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A series of squeals came from the band around Artice’s neck, and, before I could ask what it was and who she was talking to, the end of the green box appeared to vanish and a form emerged from within. At first I thought I was looking at a toy, some futuristic robot or doll. The thing that came out of the box was small, hardly coming up to my knee, and gave off an impression of slenderness, though it was impossible to tell what sort of form it possessed underneath the flowing blue gown it wore over its entire body. Its head was narrow, rectangular, and nearly featureless. Its skin—if it was skin—was the color of porcelain, with five orbs I took to be eyes, one in the top-center and two on each side. The eyes on the side of the diminutive thing’s head were spaced far apart so there was one on each end.

The newcomer made a squealing noise similar to that which had come from the band around Artice’s neck.

Artice chuckled and said, “We had a rough start. He knows very little. We need to eat and rest before I can explain things.”

Another squeal, and the thing disappeared back into its box. As it departed, I noticed it had another eye in the back of its head. Also, the peculiar being appeared to hover over the ground rather than walk, making me wonder what might be concealed beneath its gown.

Artice followed the thing and crouched down in front of the box, which she was much bigger than. If she were to lie down next to the box, she’d have at least a foot on it. Still, she got on her hands and knees and approached the opening.

“Come on,” she said.

It was my turn to laugh. “I don’t have to tell you we won’t both fit in there. No offense, but you can’t even squeeze in there on your own.” Her shoulders were nearly twice the width of the box.

“I’m looking forward to the day you take what I say for granted.” She crawled into the box. At least, she stuck her head in the box, and the rest of her vanished into thin air. One second she was there, the next: gone.

“Artice!” I screamed, without meaning to.

Suddenly, I was terrified. The thought she might have left me here in this barren place with little floating robot-creatures and singing, dancing mystery plants as its only residents filled me with a greater dread than I’d ever felt, even down in the mud pit with its gigantic guardian.

“Come in,” her voice said from the general direction of the box.

Too afraid to question her commands any further, I dropped to my hands and knees and approached the box. I could see nothing within, only darkness. Nor could I hear anything. For all I knew, I was headed into an oversized animal trap.

I made myself breathe. Told myself Artice wouldn’t have kidnapped me and brought me through no fewer than two portals to other worlds only to trap me in a box. Not quite convinced, but utterly at a loss as to what else I could do, I crawled forward and stuck my head in the box. Another violet flash and I was suddenly on my hands and knees in the middle of what appeared to be a great hall, one that was significantly bigger than the box I’d just crawled into. The room was the size of a hockey arena, with ceilings at least twenty feet tall.

Turning in a circle, still on my hands and knees, I saw Artice kneeling before a tall statue resembling the thing that had greeted us. It stood about ten feet tall and was adorned in a similar fashion to its inspiration. Only when its head turned in my direction did I realize it was alive—a gigantic version of the little thing Artice had spoken to.

The thing gave out an exuberant squeal.

“Nilt bids you welcome.”

“That’s its name?” I said. “Is this the big brother of the one who greeted us?”

Artice rose and turned to face me. “They are one and the same. The Glendwellers employ various perspective-shifting and proportion-altering technology. Outside these walls, Nilt’s house is no bigger than a cardboard box, and Nilt itself is a mere sprite. Inside, well, you can see for yourself.”

“Is this its true size?”

She smirked at me. “They have no true size. I won’t get into it now, but you could question a Glendweller for hours and still have no idea how their tech works. If it is tech. Sometimes I don’t even think they know how they move between various perspectives.”

Nilt squealed softly for several seconds. I looked to Artice for translation.

“You’ll be provided with a translator shortly,” she said. “Our timing is a little off, so they were caught unprepared for our arrival.”

“Are we early or late?” I asked.

“Yes.”

I made a note to not ask Artice any more questions.

She turned to Nilt and said, “He says ‘thank you.’”

Her translator converted her lie into squeals.

“They’re going to just give me a translator?” I said. “For free? ‘Cause I have no money. And how long are we going to be here that I’ll need a translator of my own?” So much for not asking questions.

“The translator is universal,” she said. “It works on all verbal and most non-verbal dialects. Including those not yet discovered.” She held a hand up as I opened my mouth to ask another question. “No more questions until we’ve freshened up. I’m exhausted.”

She turned away from me to converse with Nilt some more, and I took the place in. The long room was sparsely furnished, with no decor to speak of. In fact, the only furnishings of any sort—if they could be called that—were several boxes placed against the walls, smaller versions of the box we were apparently in. Did they each contain another impossible room? And in those rooms, were there more boxes? I pictured a Matryoshka-like series of rooms within rooms. One could become lost in such an arrangement. I opened my mouth to ask about them when movement from behind Nilt caught my attention.

Two more Glendwellers, one in a red gown and one in teal, had appeared from somewhere behind Nilt and were approaching us carrying, to my complete lack of surprise, more boxes, these the size of large shoe boxes. The newcomers were shorter than Nilt, closer to our own height. I wondered if that was arbitrary or a sort of signifier of rank. The thing in red made some squealing noises at Artice, and she bowed her head.

The figure in teal approached me while the one in red moved toward Artice. In unison, they placed their boxes before us, laying them at our feet before retreating to Nilt’s side. Nilt said something to Artice, and the three figures vanished.

“What was that about?” I asked Artice when they’d gone.

“Rooms, provisions, and some gifts for you,” she said. “I’d better come with you to show you everything.”

She lifted the hinged lid of the box that had been placed before me and gestured toward it with one hand.

I raised my eyebrows at her. “What?”

“After you,” she said.

We might have stared at each other for a full minute before she spoke again.

“I know you know what I’m talking about.”

“I can’t wrap my head around these larger spaces within small objects,” I said. “How is anyone supposed to just accept that?”

She stomped one foot in a surprisingly juvenile show of frustration. “Can you please just go with the flow until we’ve had something to eat? I don’t even care if you bathe or not. A nap would be so good, though. How are you not tired?”

It was the most emotion she’d displayed around me, with the exception of her reaction to the wings and beer I’d taken her for, and I decided that for now I would do as she said. Feeling awkward and stupid about it, I knelt before the open box.

“Like you’re diving into a pool,” Artice said.

I steepled my hands before me and dipped them into the box, surprised at its depth despite knowing what to expect. I bowed my head toward the opening, but before I could get the crown of my head into the box, there came the telltale flash of violet, and suddenly I was kneeling in a large bedroom. A big bed with some stuff piled on it sat at one end. At the other end of the room was what I took to be a shower stall, sink, and toilet. None of it looked like the stuff in my apartment, but it was all unexpectedly earthly. The smell of cooked food reached my nostrils, and my body reacted instantly, mouth watering and stomach rumbling. Artice appeared a second later.

“Smells incredible,” she said. “Let’s make this quick.”

She helped me to my feet, took me by the hand, and led me toward the bed. For a terrifying instant, I thought she was going to try to make love to me. And it wasn’t like she was unattractive or anything, but I sincerely thought she would break every bone in my body if she so much as tried to hug me. When she reached for one of the objects on the bed and held it out to me, my nerves settled down.

“Translator,” she said. “Wraps around your throat as you saw me do with mine. Automatically translates your speech to the native tongue of whoever you’re addressing. Also privately translates what they say to you.”

I took the object, which felt exactly like I thought it would, like one of those slap-bracelets everyone had in the nineties.

“No earpiece?” I asked.

“No earpiece.”

“Then how—?”

Artice cut me off. “Do you know how your car runs? Didn’t think so. Leave me alone about it. Your generation is so demanding about knowledge. I almost wish I’d left you to …” she trailed off and laughed softly to herself.

“What?”

“Nothing. We’re not going there. Not today. Hopefully not ever.”

I couldn’t tell if she was deliberately leading me on with these vague statements or if she simply possessed zero conversational tact. I was leaning toward the latter.

Artice turned back to the pile of stuff on the bed. “I can explain a lot of this stuff to you later, but I’ll show you the basics now.” She pointed to a folded garment. “Change of clothes, much better for traveling in. Like mine, it’ll be made of endurathread.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “It regulates body temperature, provides a bit of protection, wicks all liquids, stains, etcetera. Can I go on?”

I mimed zipping my lips shut.

She held up a device similar to what I’d seen her using outside the shipping container and in the mud pit: an oblong, metallic device with a screen taking up most of its surface. A link locator, she called it. I opened my mouth to ask a dozen questions, but closed it when I saw the withering look she gave me. She answered one of my unasked questions by telling me portals between worlds are commonly referred to as links.

Next, she showed me a small, rectangular thing that looked a bit like a tiny, black tissue box no bigger than a plum.

“Auto-collapsing-and-expanding raft, also known as an ACER,” she said. “Similar to what I used. Has a small motor equivalent to a 150cc, ten-horsepower engine.”

She avoided looking up at me as she went on listing items, knowing if I caught her gaze for even an instant, I’d have to interrupt to ask one of the billion questions I had. How was all this stuff possible? And how, if it was as easy as she made it look to travel between worlds, had we not adopted any of this stuff on Earth?

The next items she rattled off faster, leaving no room for question. I barely saw what she was pointing at as she listed them.

“Gravitational grapnel,” she said, pointing, “rebreather, water generator, follow-lamp, and alltool.”

“Alltool?” I said, incapable of keeping my mouth shut.

“Multiple manual and powered tools in one device. Knife, drill, magnifying glass, and almost anything else you could need to make small repairs or perform minor feats of engineering.” She looked at me and raised a finger to silence the tide of questions she could see coming in. “No more. I’m going to my quarters to rest. We can talk about the rest of this stuff as we travel. Get cleaned up, eat something, and sleep. You’ll be glad you did.”

Without another word, she moved to the far end of the room and placed her hand on a dark panel I hadn’t noticed before. A second later, she vanished.

In the sudden emptiness of the room, I tried not to think too much about what Artice had just said.

“… As we travel.”

Previous - Chapter 6: “The Glen

Next - Coming September 4!

Next week: Ozzy learns more about the Glendwellers and his mission.

Thank you so much for reading Ozzy’s Almanac of Other Worlds. How are you enjoying the story so far? Any predictions about what’s in store for Ozzy? Drop your thoughts in the comment section.

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Want more? Check out my novel of magic-realism, The Boy in the Canvas

Dimensional Coordinates: 488.7993.04—“The Glen”

If the monster-filled mud pit at the bottom of a shipping container blew my mind, our next stop obliterated it completely.

Did I really expect us to come out anywhere near my car? No. But I also didn’t expect to be brought anywhere other than good old planet Earth. Where I found myself was so distinctly unlike Earth, I didn’t even question we were on another planet. Or, I thought then, maybe we were on Earth, but some alternate version of it.

My experience traveling through the portal to this new place—and by that point there was not a doubt in my mind the flickering light we passed through was a portal, something I’d be unpacking for weeks after—was milder than the journey to the mud pit. For one thing, I was slightly more prepared for this one. Also, I wasn’t pushed through, nor did I have to plummet an unknown distance to reach my destination. Still, stepping through the portal was like no sensation I’d ever experienced. Upon entering the flickering white light, my body vibrated so slightly I at first thought I was imagining it, like my bones were purring. It’s the best way I can put it. And even though I only took a single step through the portal, it felt as if my stride had widened exponentially so that my single step covered uncountable miles. I could feel the distance covered by that one step. It was wild.

Coming out on the other side of the portal, my breath was stolen from me. First thing I noticed was the air, if that’s what I was breathing. It felt like a semi-solid thing, yet offered no resistance to my passage. It was almost as if I was walking submerged in water that had lost most of its weight and friction—I could feel it moving over me, but it didn’t take any extra effort to pass through. In fact, it was almost easier to move in this new place, though it was hard to tell for sure since my skin and clothes were still weighed down with reeking sludge.

The air smelled exotic compared to the mud pit, and I sucked in a deep lungful before realizing I had no idea if it was safe to breathe. Would have been a good thing to ask ahead of time. Panicked, I held the air in my lungs, which would probably have killed me a lot faster if it was toxic. Apparently I possessed zero survival skills. When Artice came through the portal behind me and filled her own lungs, I allowed myself to relax.

The sky immediately caught my eye. It was the color of quicksilver and appeared to undulate like it really was composed of mercury. The shimmering gleam of it was so far up in the sky, it gave the world I now stood in an impression of enormity. It was as if someone had trapped the planet within a silver ball many thousands of times bigger than it; the ceiling of that sky looked a lot farther away than the moon is from the Earth. Staring up at it, I felt like I could stand there for the rest of the day, absorbing the scale of it.

Eventually I lowered my gaze and allowed myself to process my immediate surroundings. We had come out on a massive platform, maybe a hundred feet wide on each side, suspended another hundred feet or so above the ground. The platform encompassed an enormous central pole made of something resembling solid stone, which stretched up farther than I could make out, though I could see another platform some vague distance overhead. I wondered how many more were above it. The tower of platforms was located in the dead center of a valley that stretched as far as the eye could see and was bordered by glimmering, pinkish-purple cliffs that rose far above where we stood, so that if I looked straight in their direction all I would see was a wall of whatever that color was—magenta, maybe? The cliffs appeared to terminate a bit before the next platform up, but it was impossible to tell from where I stood. Something occupied the plateau of the cliffs, spaced apart at even intervals, but these were also too far to discern. The valley itself was populated with more towers, similar to the one we stood upon, many of them shorter, but some towering so high, their tops were impossible to discern. We were too high up for me to make out any details of the ground below, and I was too petrified of heights to look directly down.

“Come on,” Artice said, walking around the core of our tower and disappearing around its side.

I let out a pathetic cry and ran, or, rather, shuffled after her. We were too high up for me to run or even walk very fast, like I was convinced I’d lose control and sprint right over the edge—adventure over.

When I caught up to Artice, she was stepping into a shallow nook carved into the tower and appeared to be waiting for me to join her.

“Where are we?” I demanded.

“We need to present ourselves. We can talk and I can catch you up on things afterward. They’ll give us food and a place to rest.”

“Who will?”

“Later,” she said. “Now come on.”

She stepped aside and I forced myself to step into the little chamber with her, noticing as I did so that she was hunched over, too tall to fit properly within. Even I, at all of my five feet and ten inches, lowered my head a bit to ensure I wouldn’t bump it on the low ceiling.

Before I could ask what the little chamber was, a violet flash of light exploded before my eyes, and suddenly we were no longer suspended above the valley but on its floor.

“Holy shit,” I said, following Artice out onto perfectly smooth solid ground.

The surface of the valley was composed of what could have been mistaken for ice if not for its milky-gray color. I expected it to be slippery, especially since I was still dripping mud, but the soles of my shoes gripped it like it was asphalt. As we walked, I noticed our footfalls didn’t echo as I might have expected them to on such a surface, and in such a narrow valley. Something else I noticed too.

“Where is everyone?” I asked.

Artice inclined her head slightly. “Most of the Glendwellers are homebodies. They stay in their apartments.”

“Apartments,” I repeated to myself.

“That’s my word for them,” Artice said. “Their word is impossible for us to articulate.”

Something about that statement sent a chill up my spine, but I decided not to ask for clarification for my own peace of mind.

We walked for around half an hour without seeing anyone or anything except the round bases of the towers. The valley was almost silent, but I realized, after a few minutes of walking, there was a sound just underneath the silence, almost too soft to make out: a musical lilt I could almost have passed off as the wind had there been even the slightest breeze. As it was, the air was entirely still.

“The singing comes from one of the few species of flora in the Glen,” Artice said, as if reading my thoughts. “Morrows, we call them. They sing with such perfect regularity the Glendwellers use them to tell time.”

“I have so many questions based on that statement alone,” I said.

Artice nodded upward, at the shapes I’d earlier spotted evenly spaced atop the slopes on either side of the valley. They’d been motionless when I first noticed them, but now they moved in perfect synchronization. At first I took their movement to be swaying, but, upon closer scrutiny, they seemed to be marching back and forth.

“What are they?” I asked.

“Never seen them up close. Nobody has that I know of.”

Even more questions were stirred up by her answer, something I was already growing used to. How did anyone know the Morrows were plants if they were only ever seen from a distance? I was desperate to ask, but there were other things I wanted to know first.

“What is the Glen?” I asked. “Or, where is it?”

Artice spread out her arms and gestured around us. “The Glen. As to where it is, that depends.”

“On?”

“Well,” she said in a pedantic tone, “I could say my fingernail is on my fingertip or, zooming out, on my finger. Or my hand. Or in the Glen. Do you see?”

I wondered if all our conversations from here on out would be this difficult.

“Where are we in relation to where I parked my car?”

“That’s a tougher question to answer than you might think.”

I could feel a prickle of sweat form on the back of my neck in anticipation of my next question, but it had to be asked. “What planet are we on?”

“We should wait to talk about this stuff,” she said.

“Please,” I insisted. “You dropped into my life out of nowhere, threw me into a mud pit, then forced me to follow you to a strange valley populated by singing monsters. Just tell me where we are and I can wait for the rest.”

Artice stopped and turned to face me. “I think you know we’re not on Earth.”

“What planet is this then? Venus?”

“Why Venus?”

“Artice.”

She sighed. “As far as I know, we aren’t on a planet. Not like any planet you know of anyway.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” I asked. “We’re obviously on solid ground. Are you telling me we’re on a ship, some kind of spacecraft?”

“We’re not on any sort of vehicle,” she said. “Nor is this a planet. From what we can tell, the entirety of this realm is contained on this surface, whatever it might be. Tough to know for sure because it’s forbidden to leave the Glen.”

“You’ve never been out of this valley?”

“Nobody has.”

I thought for a minute, then said, “I’ll leave that alone until later, but only because it makes my brain bleed. What kind of people are these Glendwellers?”

Artice turned her back on me and began walking in the direction we’d been headed. “After. We have to present ourselves. You should get cleaned off and eat something before we talk. I’d rather you slept, but I’m sure you won’t let yourself until I’ve explained some things.”

All I could do was follow her.

After maybe half an hour of walking past the bases of the Glendwellers’ apartments, Artice finally broke from the straight line we’d been headed in and bore right, toward one wall of the valley. In a few minutes, we came to a tower that stood out from all the rest in a simple but effective way: while the bases of the rest of the towers were white, this one was the same purple-pink color of the surrounding cliffs, which provided it with a degree of camouflage. Without pausing, Artice stepped into the little alcove cut into the tower and beckoned me to follow. The instant I stepped inside, there was that flash of light and suddenly we were looking across the valley from about halfway up the height of the walls. Straight ahead was a wall of magenta broken here and there by the white pillars of the other apartments. To our right, as we stepped out the door, was a green metallic box the size of a large refrigerator laid on its side. It was adorned with designs resembling connect-the-dots, or maybe alien constellations, all rendered in black.

Artice clipped a metallic band around her throat and announced, “I’ve brought the Pioneer.”

Previous - Chapter 5: “Mud Pit”

Next - Coming August 28!

Next week: Ozzy is presented to the inhabitants of The Glen.

Thank you so much for reading Ozzy’s Almanac of Other Worlds. How are you enjoying the story so far? Any predictions about what’s in store for Ozzy? Drop your thoughts in the comment section.

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Want more? Check out my novel of magic-realism, The Boy in the Canvas

Music, as I’ve probably said a billion times, is super important to me. All kinds of music. Rock and roll, alternative, metal, classical, funk, blues, soul, disco, ambient, old country, a very small amount of new country, a very small amount of hip hop, and lots of stuff in between. I often have music playing when I’m working or writing, and am usually particular about what I play. If I’m working: rock, metal, alternative, or hip hop. Cooking: rock, metal, alternative, hip hop, or classical. Reading: almost exclusively classical. Writing: all depends on the project.

Ozzy’s Almanac of Other Worlds is what many refer to as portal fiction, or portal sci-fi, and most of what I listened to while writing is pretty blatantly reflective of the genre.

All except the first of the albums listed are instrumental.

Spirit World Field Guide - Aesop Rock

I’d be remiss not to mention the album that helped bring the idea for Ozzy’s Almanac of Other Worlds to life. I’ve mentioned this album before, in my article about where the idea came from. The entire vibe of this album still makes me want to embark on an otherworldly adventure. Aesop Rock has a way with words that speaks directly to my creative heart. Tracks like “The Gates”, “Dog at the Door”, “Gauze”, and “Crystal Sword” all elicit the desire for strange journeys, while eliciting a strong sense of nostalgia. Listening to them makes me want to sit down and write something crazy and heartfelt. Tough to discuss this album without diving deep into the lyrics, so I’m going to leave it at that. If you want to know what I mean, listen to the album without other distractions, so you can pay attention to the lyrics. Every album of his after this one, for the record, has the same effect on me to varying degrees.

Inert - Wojciech Golczewski

Even though I listen to this guy’s music all the time, I constantly have to look up the spelling of his name when searching for an album. For this reason, I’ll refer to him as WG.

I’ve enjoyed every one of WG’s albums to some degree, but Inert has this ominous, liminal tone to it that helped me craft the opening chapters to Ozzy’s Almanac of Other Worlds. It’s almost a noir album, if that’s a thing. The track titles, too, tell a story of their own: “How Long Had I Been Back”, “The Split of a Second”, and “Wrong About Everything” are just a couple of titles that stir something in me.

Doom Fortress - Voyag3r

Voyag3r’s Doom Fortress would be the perfect boss battle album. Driving synth beats reminiscent of the best 80s sci-fi are what it’s all about. I defy you to listen this and not be taken back to grainy footage of kids pedalling their hearts out, either fleeing from, or riding heroically toward some confrontation with a villain more powerful than themselves. I would frequently put this album on when writing an intense chapter or scene, allowing it to set the pace for my writing.

This is also an excellent album to drive to, though it makes me want to go faster than may be considered safe.

Liquid Crystal - Zombi

This is an exceptionally short album that I would frequently play on repeat. The music, while intense, has a steady rhythm to it that I found easy to fall into. It’s one of those albums I can forget I’m listening to, but miss the instant it stops. It’s subdued, yet pervasive. Zombi has a number of albums I enjoy listening to, but this is the album of theirs I played the most while writing Almanac.

Union of Worlds - Majeure

Let’s round this out with five albums.

Union of Worlds is another one I would often play on repeat. It has a more subtle tone than most of the others I’ve listed, and is jam packed with atmosphere. I could really settle into a writing groove with this playing through my headphones. Union of Worlds takes the listener on a journey through realms, full of intrigue and drama. It’s an album I like to have on while writing almost anything speculative. I can listen to the opening track, “Overmind”, and perfectly imagine myself drifting through space on a clunky 80s spacecraft.

This is also a favourite album of mine to read to.

And that’s it. Have you listened to any of these albums? Heard of any of these artists? Will you listen to any of them?

What’s your go-to album for working, creating, reading, or otherwise getting lost in?

If you like this sort of stuff, maybe check out my serialized science fiction adventure Ozzy’s Almanac of Other Worlds. New chapters come out every week, all narrated by myself, if listening is more your thing.

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Dimensional Coordinates: 943.0079.01—Undesignated

I thrashed in the muck, mired in the thick sludge covering every inch of everything in sight, which itself was all just more mud. My clothes quickly became weighed down with the stuff, and even raising my arm over my head took an enormous amount of effort. Every breath was accompanied by wet, foul-tasting grime that slithered toward the back of my mouth and down my throat like it was a living thing. I spat and gasped, fighting with every ounce of strength I possessed, which wasn’t nearly enough.

Trying desperately to stay afloat, I screamed at the top of my lungs, calling the name of the only person in the vicinity. From Artice, though, there was no response. At least, none I could hear. The only sounds were my labored breathing and the squelching of the mud inexorably dragging me to my death.

Where the hell was Artice? Had she really followed me all the way out into the middle of nowhere only to throw me in a mud pit? For that matter, where had all the mud come from? I could see far enough to know I was neither in the shipping container nor the field it lay in. Had there been a trap door in the container opening up to this muddy hellscape? Is that what those two weirdos had been planning on doing with me?

My incredulity lasted only a second. The sludge was up to my chin, and I had to look straight up in order to breathe. Hanging overhead was a dim, yellowish sky the color of a dying man’s piss, all foggy dark amber, like exhaust from a doomsday machine. It taunted me with hopelessness. Nothing in the smog-like atmosphere could be interpreted as encouraging.

As I sank deeper into the sludge, I wondered at the sky above. How could it be there? Assuming I wasn’t actually dead or dreaming, the only explanation had to be some kind of lighting effect. But to what end? Or had I fallen so far into the earth that I was experiencing a second sky? Holy shit, had Hollow Earthers been right all along?

I screamed Artice’s name, putting everything I had into it, even halting my thrashing for a moment to pour every available shred of energy into my voice. But even if she’d been standing next to me, I doubt she’d have heard me over the wretched bellowing that suddenly filled the air. It sounded like a lion with a mouthful of jelly, though whatever the call had originated from was no doubt significantly more terrifying.

The muck around me started to froth and bubble. It vibrated in a way that might have been therapeutic in a spa setting, but made me want to void my bowels in the mud-drenched hell I’d found myself in.

A wall of sludge rose up before me, impossibly high in the air—a tidal wave of the thickest muck imaginable. Feeling a sort of calm acceptance come over me, I slowed my struggles so that I was barely kicking my feet, which still took more effort than cycling uphill on a forty-five-degree angle. The tsunami would come crashing down on me any second, obliterating all hope of survival.

Instead of crashing forward, though, the muck sluiced downward, running off some solid object underneath. A solid object that shook its four gargantuan limbs, flinging island-sized gobs of mud in every direction. A glob the size of a minivan slammed into the ooze next to me with an explosive farting sound, and I found myself wishing it had hit me and broken my neck, sparing me from the increasing insanity that had suddenly taken over my life.

When the monstrous thing before me shook itself like a wet dog, revealing a row of black eyes that glowed from within, I forgot all about calling for help and screamed in pure, pants-shitting terror.

The thing had a wide, football-shaped head held up on a massive body at least twenty stories high. Mud still sluiced from its body in a hundred brown waterfalls, and the racket of it all hitting the surface below was cacophonous. The limbs groped about in the air, as if in search of mountains to topple. Four black, somehow radiant eyes searched the horizon, not yet seeing me, probably because, to it, I was no bigger than a mosquito. Not that going unseen made me any safer; one move from this thing in my direction and I’d be tossed miles away on the ensuing surge.

I might never know how long I kept myself afloat, staring up at the enormous thing endlessly dripping mud before me. No matter how much sludge left its body, the monster never became more distinct, never showed any more of itself. Its four arms—for lack of a better anatomical term—picked at the muck, as if in search of something. One of the limbs would grab at a section of mud with what looked like triple-digit claws and hold the dripping clump of filth before the thing’s eyes for inspection. It never seemed to find what it was looking for, though; each sample was tossed back into the sea of sludge.

My arms and legs ached, barely functioning anymore. Whatever minuscule movements they made did little to keep me afloat. Only the density of the mud seemed to hold me up, though it had now risen above my chin. Hope had long ago fled. So, I realized, had my fear. Now I stared at the creature risen from the mud with curiosity. Had this thing been living under the earth all this time? Were there more like it? Did those freaks in the robes worship it? My biggest regret was that I’d never know.

Over the slurping sounds of the creature’s movements, I thought I could make out another noise. Had to be my imagination combined with the mud in my ears, though. Sounded like someone calling my name. Ridiculous in this subterranean bog.

Exhausted, I stopped moving altogether, immediately sinking another inch into the mire, so that the mud reached my lips. Not long now. I was strangely at peace.

And then, just as I felt myself slipping the rest of the way into my soupy grave, strong hands grabbed me under my arms and lifted. I felt the sludge sucking at my feet, trying to keep me down. I almost helped it, lifted my hands to push away whoever was trying to free me, but my arms were too tired and I gave up after a second. After a lot of grunting and tugging, I was dropped onto solid ground, and, just like that, my will to live returned. My eyes shot open, and I breathed in deeply, surprised at how loose my chest felt. The mud had apparently been constricting me, cutting my breath short. Is that why I’d been so willing to die?

“I’m so sorry,” a voice, muffled by the sludge in my ears, said from behind me. “Just lie still and try to get your breath back.”

I craned my neck and saw Artice kneeling behind me. She had that peculiar oblong device in her hands again and moved it around as she’d been doing before throwing me into this pit. I noticed the mud slid from the sleeves of her jumpsuit as if they had been coated in Teflon. Gone, too, were the green and brown stains I’d seen covering her outfit following her altercation with the two strange dudes in deadly robes. Interesting.

“You—” I began, breaking off into a coughing fit. I still had too much mud in my lungs to speak.

“I know,” she said. “I’ll get us out of here, I promise.”

“Where is here?” I managed to say.

“Better to wait until we’re safe.”

The thing in her hands gave a trill that sounded more like the call of an exotic bird than any machine. In the next instant, a humming vibration started up underneath me. Whatever I was lying on had either started to purr or had been switched on. I felt the vague sensation of movement, but, given the featureless nature of the sky overhead, couldn’t tell if it was an illusion or if we were really on the go. I was about to ask when another ear-splitting bellow came from all around, vibrating through my skull and making my teeth ache. The sensation of acceleration intensified, and now I knew we were moving. Gingerly, I pulled myself into a sitting position, immediately getting a face full of rank wind.

Several things became apparent then. I was in a boat, for one thing. More like a raft with what looked like the tiniest motor in the world, though we seemed to be moving at a good clip. Artice held a small box in her hands, thumb on a joystick that she appeared to be using to guide us. The raft, which was made of a surprisingly thin material, zipped across the mud, bouncing on the low waves. Next, I noticed, with no small amount of joy, that there was land after all. We appeared to be headed toward an island or peninsula, hard to tell which at this angle. Peaked rises, like miniature mountains, populated the land. I didn’t care, as long as it was solid ground.

The last, and most significant, thing I noticed was the four-armed kaiju-sized monster. It had taken notice of us and was turning its massive head to follow our progress. One of its gigantic limbs reached out for us, missing by mere feet and plunging into the mud, stirring up waves that rocked our craft. The limb was as big around as an ancient sequoia but appeared supple. It was covered in what I at first took to be barnacles, but quickly realized were blackish, slithering, many-legged creatures the size of guinea pigs. They covered the limb, crawling over one another, higher and higher as if to avoid the mud.

“See that tall peak?” Artice shouted, ignoring the limb as it retracted from the muck.

I couldn’t take my eyes from the retreating limb, which rose high into the air above us. Any moment now it would come crashing back down to capsize us, or, worse, pluck us from the boat and pop us into the monster’s mouth.

“Ozzy!” she screamed.

Forcing myself to turn from the creature, I looked toward the landmass. “Which one?”

They all looked tall.

“The tallest. Smack in the middle of the rest.”

Now that she said it, I could tell which one she meant. The peak of the centermost rise was slightly taller than the rest.

“The very instant we hit land, run for its base.”

A thick, slapping splash next to us stole my attention. The monster had made a grab for us again, this time missing only by inches. A couple of the crawling things detached from its arm and landed in the boat. They immediately thrashed about, as if on fire. Recoiling and staring at them in horrified fascination, I realized they were eyeless.

The craft rocked violently as we ran aground, and I nearly toppled out. Remembering Artice’s words, I leapt from the boat. Tried to, anyway. My muscles were still very sore and cramped almost to paralysis. It was all I could do to keep from falling on my face.

“Go!” Artice shouted.

I turned to look at her, ready to deliver an ill-timed admonishment, and stopped when I saw the boat was gone. Had the thing taken it? I looked past Artice but couldn’t tell if the monster held anything in its limbs.

Artice shoved at me, half lifting me into the air, and I started running.

The terrain was slick and rocky, making it difficult to get anywhere very fast, especially covered in mud as I was. Still, I managed to keep my footing. I’d like to have thought I was keeping up with Artice, but she was very obviously slowing her own pace so as to not leave me behind.

We reached the peaks, and I almost laughed when I saw most were no taller than a two-story house. The tallest, the one we were headed for, was maybe fifty feet tall at most. Like the ground, the peaks were made of an almost crystalline black rock that might have glittered if there was any sunlight breaking through the sallow clouds overhead.

When we made it to our destination, Artice pulled out her little metal device again, consulting it in some way that escaped me. The thing appeared to have a screen when I’d seen her use it earlier, but now it looked mostly featureless. It trilled, a slightly different exotic bird sound, and Artice let out what I hoped was a relieved sigh.

“This one will be much better, I promise,” she said.

Before I could ask what that meant, a frighteningly familiar flickering white light appeared before us.

I took a step back. “Nope.”

“It’s the only way to safety,” Artice said gently, holding a hand out for mine.

“Last time you chucked me into that light, I wound up here,” I said.

“Nothing I could have done about that.”

“Except not throw me into it.”

She crossed her arms. “Would you have gone in willingly?”

“Hell no,” I said. “Which did not give you the right to toss me in.”

“I won’t do that again,” she said. “Unless you don’t go yourself in the next few seconds.”

“You’re insane,” I said.

“I’m trying to save your life.”

“Because I’m supposed to save humanity?”

“Precisely.”

Her gaze, gentle and firm, betrayed none of the delusion she must be suffering. Clearly she did not understand throwing someone to their doom and then pulling them out at the last second could not constitute saving that person’s life. What would happen if I stepped into this strangely liquid pool of light?

It wasn’t her look or anything she said that finally convinced me. First there was the monster, which now appeared to be moving in our direction with some degree of haste. Second, I hoped we might be brought back to my car. Whether it started or not, I intended to stay locked within until I could summon a tow truck. Somehow, though, I knew I’d never see the Camry again. Something irreversible had occurred, though I was a long way from comprehending what.

Without a word to Artice, I turned back to the pool of white light and stepped inside. To my surprise and immense relief, I did not fall.

Previous - Chapter 4: “This Does Not Look Like a Convention”

Next - Chapter 6: “The Glen”

Next week: A strange new world welcomes Ozzy and prepares him for the journey to come.

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Want more? Check out my novel of magic-realism, The Boy in the Canvas

“Is this right?” I asked as I pulled the car up to the point indicated on my map.

No answer from the back seat, which, by then, was no surprise. The oddly dressed pair had remained silent for the entire drive. I’d tossed out a couple of shallow questions by way of making conversation, not because I really cared to engage with them, but because their silence unnerved me. I was used to riders who minded their own business—preferred them, in fact—but I couldn’t remember ever having given a ride to multiple passengers at once who didn’t speak to one another. Even the quiet solo fares would acknowledge me with the bare minimum of a grunt before turning their attention to their phone screen. These two stared straight ahead for the entire ride, not even looking out their windows to take in the scenery.

If their silence made me anxious, the place we pulled up to gave me chills. We were far outside the city, in what could generously be called farm country, though we’d only passed a single plantation, which looked completely abandoned, crumbling barn and all. I’d pulled my car into a short gravel drive terminating in front of a shipping container sunk low into the weedy grass, which grew around it at nearly chest height. The container bore a rusting, faded coat of blue paint and had a door built into it, like it had been turned into a dwelling. With the exception of the power lines running the length of the road, there were no other structures in sight. No other vehicles either, which further set my nerves on edge.

I glanced in my rearview. “This is where the map said to take you guys. If it’s wrong, I need you to change the location in the app.”

Instead of answering, the pair opened their doors simultaneously and got out of the car. The relief I felt was all-consuming, like I’d just been given a clean bill of health after being told I’d die of brain cancer in a week. I had to laugh at myself for being so paranoid, though I could hardly be blamed considering the week I’d been having.

The car’s engine died the instant their doors slammed in unison. It was so synchronized, I was almost certain they’d somehow killed the poor car with their overzealous closing of the doors. It was the same thing that had happened the other night, when I’d attempted to flee from Artice. I pressed the engine start button several times, with no discernible result.

My thoughts came frantically, one dire realization after another. The car was dead, again, after receiving the all-clear from the mechanic. Frustrating. Worse, though, was that I was trapped in the middle of nowhere with the two silent weirdos. Nobody around for miles. I half expected my phone to show there was no signal, but, graciously, it still had full bars. Small wins. I reached for it to call for a tow when I noticed a shape just outside my window. Actually, I noticed two shapes in the periphery of my vision. On the passenger side, a wall of green. On my side, a brown obtrusion. The mute guys in their peculiar cosplay outfits.

Just as I was willing to consider they might be here to help, both doors were ripped open. I reacted in a panic, slapping at the hands I expected to reach in and grab me. But no hands touched me. Instead, the fabric of their cloaks invaded the car, filling it, covering my face and body. I registered a strangely sanitary smell coming off them, almost like bleach, before I realized the feel of them was more like flesh than fabric. I’d visited an aquarium once, as a kid, where they’d had a stingray exhibit where guests were allowed to pet the rays as they passed through a shallow pool attached to their larger tank. The fabric felt sort of like the skin of the stingrays, though much lighter and more yielding. I had only an instant to register this before I realized they were smothering me.

There came a muffled clicking sound, and I felt my seatbelt loosen around me. Next thing I knew, I was lifted from the car and dropped to the ground, landing on my back hard enough to knock the wind from me. The garments fluttered over my body, not quite pressing down, but covering me so completely, it became hard to breathe.

Panicked, I thrashed, kicking and punching at the cloaks and hitting nothing solid. I imagined the guys standing naked over me, flapping their cloaks over my body like they were trying to send smoke signals.

I rolled to one side, trying to evade the attack, and only succeeding in smashing my elbow on the hubcap of my car.

“Stop!” I screamed in panicked agony, though my muffled voice couldn’t have traveled far beyond the fabric.

I flipped onto my belly then, crawling on hands and knees like I was trapped in a house fire. The cloaks followed me, battering relentlessly, if painlessly.

Without warning, my skull came into contact with something incredibly hard, and I fell prone, eyes watering, head swimming. I rolled onto my back, in so much pain I couldn’t care less about the fluttering, mildly suffocating robes dancing in my face. Panic became grim acceptance, albeit steeped in trepidation for what was to come. I only prayed these guys weren’t part of a cannibalistic rape cult. A quick, rapeless death, that’s all I wanted.

Suddenly, the robes were ripped away, first the brown, then the green. The sun beat down from overhead, forcing my eyes shut, which was just as well because my head throbbed too much for me to look at anything. From around me came the noise of grunts and scuffles. Then, the sound of fabric tearing, followed closely by an unearthly wail like nothing I’d ever heard. More sounds of exertion, and then a second tearing sound and another of those cries.

Silence followed. Or, near-silence. Someone close by was breathing heavily. I forced myself to open my eyes. And screamed.

Artice stood a few feet away, face flushed, hair slightly out of place. Her once-immaculate blue jumpsuit bore a coating of dust, stray pieces of grass, and what appeared to be splatters of brown and green that closely matched the cloaks of the guys who’d just jumped me, and who, I noted, were nowhere in sight. Their robes, however, were in tatters on the ground between me and Artice. Splotches of the same brown and green stuff that stained her jumpsuit covered the ground between us and were almost indistinguishable from the torn pieces of fabric.

For a long, uncomfortable moment, we just stared at each other. My head throbbed, eyes still watering. I made myself sit up, fighting an aching wave of nausea and resting my back against the shipping container. Artice frowned down at me.

“You chase those guys off?” I asked, closing my eyes against the pounding ache in my head.

When no response came, I forced my eyes open to look up at Artice. She was still frowning, eyes narrowed, arms hanging limply at her sides, shoulders slumped. Once more, I got the feeling there was something familiar about her, though I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what.

“You lied to me,” she said. Her voice cracked, and I realized she was hurt. Like, emotionally.

I could only stare at her. I knew the right thing to do was apologize, especially after she’d scared off my attackers, but I was too puzzled by her distress. Had she really followed me all the way out here to accost me for being dishonest? Why did she care so much? Also …

“How did you find me?” I said through a mouth full of mush. My head hurt so damn much.

“Never mind that,” she said. “We have to go. Immediately.”

“My car is dead,” I said. “Again.”

She didn’t respond, only pulled me to my feet so quickly my head threatened to crumple in on itself. I would have screamed if I wasn’t convinced the noise would only worsen my agony. Eyes shut, I swayed in place for a moment, tempted to let my body crash to the ground. When I opened my eyes, Artice was walking in circles with an oblong, metallic device held in one hand. It sort of reminded me of a portable gaming device, or maybe a clunky GPS.

“What is that?” I asked, curious in spite of my pain.

She continued walking in widening circles, staring at the device.

“Has to be here somewhere,” she murmured.

I watched her for a few minutes, puzzled and amused. In her flashy jumpsuit, and with her ridiculous muscle tone, she looked like a character from a comic book. The strange device in her hand only added to the image.

After a few minutes, I began to tire of watching her and realized I hadn’t yet called for a tow truck. Ignoring Artice, I stepped around the tatters of green and brown fabric and matching globs of mystery substance, stumbling only a little bit, and reached into my car for my phone. I snatched it from its mount on the dash and, in my haste to call roadside assistance, smashed my head on the roof of the car as I was climbing back out.

At the same instant my head collided with the car, Artice said, “Got it.”

I immediately became aware of a rushing sound, like wind blowing past me, though the day was completely still. There came the creak and groan of steel hinges and, following that, a high-pitched keening that tripled the pain I felt in my head. Clutching my skull, I whirled to see Artice standing before the now-open door of the shipping container, weird device held before her. From within the container came a white flickering light, sort of like a cathode-ray tube television displaying static. Oddly precise, I know, but that’s what I was reminded of. Okay, specifically I was thinking of that scene in Poltergeist and had to resist quoting Heather O’Rourke’s timeless phrase.

Before I could question any of what was happening, Artice grabbed me by the arm and threw me into the shipping container. Instead of landing on cold steel, however, I was plunged into a maelstrom of swirling white light. Convinced I’d smashed my head again and had finally been knocked properly unconscious, I gave in to the turbulence carrying me off to God-knew-where. At that moment, I’d have been happy to have found out I was dead, that I didn’t have to worry about strange fares, painful head trauma, or paying rent anymore.

Then I landed. Not on the hard floor of the shipping container, or in a tangle of wild grass, but in a reeking pit of mud in which I immediately began to drown.

Previous - Chapter 3: “Is That Cosplay?”

Next - Chapter 4: “Mud Pit”

Next week: Ozzy fights to stay alive in his baffling new environment.

Thank you so much for reading Ozzy’s Almanac of Other Worlds. How are you enjoying the story so far? Any predictions about what’s in store for Ozzy? Drop your thoughts in the comment section.

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Want more? Check out Encore by Christopher Sweet—a novel of rock & roll, redemption, and other dimensions

A few weeks ago, I started a project that I’ve been dwelling on for half a decade. Or, rather, I began sharing this project with the general public a few weeks ago. Ozzy’s Almanac of Other Worlds is something I’ve been turning over, making notes on, writing, re-writing, re-thinking, and daydreaming about for about five years, give or take a few months. If you’re wondering:

Ozzy’s Almanac of Other Worlds is a serialized science fiction adventure novel about a ride-share driver tasked with saving humanity from certain doom by finding them a new world to inhabit.

All of my writing up until pretty recently has been pretty horror-centric. I want to talk about genre a bit, but I’m going to have to save that tangent for another post. Suffice it to say, I caught myself off-guard by coming up with a science fiction concept. I should have seen it coming, and I believe that, perhaps, my subconscious has been guiding me to this kind of writing for some time. Maybe I’ve been resisting it. Or maybe I was waiting for the right idea.

My publishing imprint is called The Other Door Publishing. I named it thus because of my fascination with other worlds, alternate realities, and strange possibilities. I’ve always loved things like The Twilight Zone, The X-Files, and Sliders. In fact, Sliders was likely a pretty big inspiration for the original concept of Ozzy’s Almanac of Other Worlds (which I will henceforth refer to as OAOW to save my fingers any undue exertion)—the whole notion of hopping from world to world may have come directly from childhood memories of that show. Point being, in naming my imprint The Other Door, which stems from my interest in alternate dimensions, I sort of unconsciously set the stage for myself to stray into other realms of speculative fiction.

Anyway. About half a decade ago, as I was preparing my

first novel for publication and was in the early stages of writing my second, I had an idea bouncing around in my skull about some poor bloke being forced to travel through strange alternate realities for some reason or another. That was all. I had a vague idea of how he got to these other worlds—this concept was abandoned pretty early on—but I didn’t really know why. Somewhere in my stacks of filled notebooks are pages of early summaries, false starts, and point-form notes on means of interdimensional travel, potential worlds, and possible life forms for the hero to encounter. Speaking of whom, the protagonist was another unknown. There was no Ozzy at that time. As I write this, I’m trying not to gag at the memory of some of my early character sketches. I believe one iteration was a middle-aged salesman fed up with working for the man. Not at all derivative.

One day, five years ago, in what I believe was late-fall, I was in the car on my own, driving to town for some errand or another. It’s about a one-hour drive on a very straight, relatively boring stretch of highway. Perfect for letting my mind wander.

I’m not a big hip-hop guy, but I appreciate a good lyricist who can rap to a beat I can bob my head to. There is exactly one such artist I listen to: Aesop Rock (NOT A$AP Rocky). I’d been introduced to Aesop Rock ages ago and, for whatever reason, had decided to look him up before that fateful drive. Lo and behold, he had a relatively new album out—Spirit World Field Guide—the name and artwork of which caught my attention. I downloaded it prior to my drive so I could listen to the whole thing from start to finish in the car. The album opens with a track called “Hello from the Spirit World”, which serves as the introduction to the general theme of the album. The track is a spoken word preamble to a field guide for interdimensional travel. It grabbed me immediately. The rest of the album, while plumbing the depths of the artist’s psyche and personal struggles, cloaks itself under sci-fi and pop culture references and innuendo. On its surface, I found the album to be tantalizing and creatively provocative. The more I listen to it, the more depth and nuance the lyrics hold for me. But this isn’t a review of an album of the only hip-hop artist I listen to.

Something about the cadence, the lyrics, the extremely cool beats stirred my creative juices and brought to the surface of that briny soup the concept of an otherworldly traveler I’d been tossing around for some time. The album’s title (Spirit World Field Guide) spoke to me. That’s when I knew my own concept would revolve around a chronicle of the protagonist’s journey through other realms. Not a field guide, though. A travel guide. An exposé. A map. An almanac!

From there, other elements fell into place, though not always easily. It wasn’t much of a leap to decide the purpose of the almanac was to aid in humanity’s search for a new home. Why they were looking for a new home was a whole other beast altogether, and one I spent countless nights staring at the ceiling thinking about. Other story elements fell into place like an extremely slow game of Tetris, with unsuitable pieces swiftly piling up to one side, while the rare pieces that fit were carefully wedged into place. Years later, I finally sat down to write the thing.

Ozzy’s career as a ride-share driver was almost certainly directly inspired by my own years spent doing the same thing, though, the more I re-read and re-work the story, the more I see his vocation as a portent of things to come—an outer ripple from the core of the story. I won’t spoil things by elaborating any further on that particular aspect.

There are probably a billion other things that inspired OAOW, many of which I’ll never be aware of. Certainly I’ve been influenced by books I’ve read, other music I’ve listened to, movies and shows I’ve watched, people I’ve spoken to, and places I’ve been. Maybe I’ll even be able to identify some of these things and will compile a descriptive list of some of the more influential titles, places, people, and things. Not right now, though. I’ve got audio to edit for the next chapter of Ozzy’s Almanac of Other Worlds.

Thanks for reading.

-Chris

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Half an hour later, we found ourselves seated in a sticky booth in the dimly lit bar of Chuley’s, which, in my opinion, and admittedly limited experience, served the best damn chicken wings in the world. I ordered a pound of the spicy butter wings, and Artice ordered four pounds of the same.

“You didn’t even look at the menu,” I remarked as our server left with our order. “They have like fifty different sauces and rubs.”

Artice, who’d grown oddly enthusiastic when I told her this place was known for its chicken wings, only grinned at me, eyes aglow.

Our server, a redheaded girl of maybe nineteen, came back with a couple of glasses of water and watched as Artice first sipped, then chugged hers. The server raised her eyebrows at me. I shrugged like I’d been seeing this sort of thing all my life.

Artice gently placed her glass on the table—in contrast to what I expected her to do, which was hurl it to the floor like a Viking—and meekly asked for another glass of water, directing the question at me with pleading eyes.

“Why are you asking me?” I said. “Go nuts.”

Our perplexed server vanished with the empty glass.

“I know you don’t have a lot of money,” Artice said. “I don’t want you wasting it all on me.”

“Good thing water’s free.”

Her jaw dropped open for a split second before she closed it, smirking at me. “You’re messing with me.”

“I can come up with better material than that,” I said. “If you were so concerned about money, you could have started with one or two pounds of wings.”

Now she looked mortified. “Are they expensive? I got excited. I’ve never had them before.”

“Seriously?” I said. “In that case, get ten pounds. How have you lived this long and never had a chicken wing in your life?”

“Or any part of a chicken, for that matter,” she said, almost dismissively.

“I’m sorry?”

“Never had the opportunity.”

I forced a laugh and shook my head. Should’ve known from the start she was the one messing with me.

Our server came back with Artice’s second glass of water, placed it before her, and stood back with an expectant look on her face. Artice only sipped at the water this time, closing her eyes in apparent bliss.

“This is the best water I’ve ever had,” she told the server in a tone of complete reverence. “It tastes so fresh.”

Now convinced I was dining with a legitimate crackpot, our server backed away with a promise she’d be back soon with our wings. Minutes later, she made good on her vow, placing a plastic basket of eight or nine sizzling wings in front of me and a literal pail of them in front of Artice, who plucked a wing out, took a tentative bite, then stripped the rest of the meat off with a single chomp. No way she’d never eaten wings before. She went through her pail faster than I managed to eat my punky little basket, and I’m no slowpoke when it comes to eating. When she’d finished, she belched loudly, gulped the rest of her water, and belched again. There were only a few other diners in the bar, but they all turned toward us with each expulsion of gas. Unable to face them, I stared down at the bones littering my plate. Artice had dropped hers all over the table and, seeing how I’d arranged mine, scooped them into the pail.

“How long has it been since you last had a proper meal?” I asked her when the carnage was over.

She laughed. “Like this? Never. I had a nutripack this morning, but you know how they are.”

“I do not,” I said, assuming she was referring to a brand of health shake I’d never heard of. “So, are we good now?”

I was still under the impression she’d only claimed to want to speak with me so I’d buy her some food. Four pounds of wings is a heck of a better deal than whatever she might get at the soup kitchen, so I assumed I’d exceeded expectations and would soon be rid of her, fool that I was.

“We’ve never not been good,” she said, wiping her mouth on the sleeve of her peculiar jumpsuit, which I realized must have been relatively expensive, especially for someone who can’t afford a meal. “But we still need to talk.”

I slumped back in my seat with a sigh I didn’t bother concealing.

Artice leaned forward, a sudden fire in her eyes. “You drive strangers around for a living. You brought me here and provided me with what has to be premium-grade water and the best food I’ve ever tasted, and you have an issue with a bit of conversation?”

She had a point, I was surprised to realize. Why was I so hesitant to speak with her? I could blame it on the fact I’d been convinced she was threatening my life when we’d first met, but that should have precluded me bringing her for lunch. What was it then?

“You’re right,” I said. “Apologies. I’m not the chatty sort of driver, for the record. But, yeah, seems like hearing what you have to say is probably the least of my concerns. What’s up?”

Sitting back in her seat, she fixed me with a somber glare. She stared directly into my eyes, and, as much as I wanted to avoid the implied intimacy, I returned her gaze. It appeared to me like she was searching for something behind my eyes, like she expected to find something familiar there, but didn’t see it where she ought to. Did I know this woman? Was she someone from my past? An old schoolmate who’d looked me up on social media after suffering a mental breakdown, and now fixated on me, waiting for the opportunity to strip the skin from my bones and fashion it into a new unitard? I did my best to shake the notion from my mind.

“You’re going to think I’m insane,” she said.

“Already do. No offense.”

“I need your word you’ll hear me out to the end, no matter how crazy I sound.”

“Fine,” I said. “But when the mechanic calls, I’m leaving to pick up my car.”

She nodded, apparently satisfied with that.

“Will this take a while?” I asked. “Should we get a couple of beers? Otherwise they may ask us to leave.” I was thinking about the way our server had watched her pound the water. No doubt she’d also witnessed Artice’s performance with the wings.

At the mention of beer, Artice’s eyes lit up. She opened her mouth, clearly about to express uncalled-for enthusiasm, but caught herself and closed it, giving me a restrained nod instead. When the server came back to collect our chicken bones, I ordered a jug of the house pilsner and did not miss the side eye she gave Artice.

When the beer arrived, I poured us each a glass and slid one across to Artice. She sipped, frowned, and sipped again.

“Not at all like I was expecting,” she said, taking a longer sip.

“Out with it,” I said. “Time’s ticking.”

“It really is,” she said. And then, without changing her tone, “Less than fifty hours from now, human dominance of this planet will cease to exist. Fewer than six million people are projected to survive what’s to come. Those who do will be repurposed. The planet itself will be little more than dust within a year.”

“That’s all?” I said, glancing at my phone for a way out of the conversation.

“Not even close. You’re the only one capable of finding a new home for the surviving members of the race.”

“And you’ve come from beyond to warn me.”

She only stared.

I wasn’t even surprised. If anything, I was disappointed. But only marginally.

My phone’s text alert went off, and I glanced down to see it was a message from the mechanic.

“I’m flattered,” I said.

She balked. “For what?”

“To be thought of so highly. Feels nice.”

“You don’t believe me.”

I felt like a jerk, but it would have been worse to lead her on. Had to nip this in the bud before she escalated, breaking into my apartment, and watching me in my sleep. Bad enough she’d stalked me to my building. I didn’t even want to consider how she discovered where I lived. The right thing to do here was to be completely candid with her, and let her know I would not entertain her fantasies any longer.

“I believe you, a hundred percent,” I said. “And I think we should get started as soon as possible.”

She sat back, eyebrows raised. “For real?”

“Definitely.” I pawed through my wallet for enough to cover the meal, plus a stingy tip, and laid it out on the table. “I just have to deal with a few personal things first.”

“What kind of things?” she asked, watching me through narrowed eyes.

“My parents are both really sick. I check in on them every day to make sure they’re taking their meds.” I stood, trying to make it look casual. “And I’ll have to make arrangements for them. I’m assuming we’ll be gone a while.”

“For good,” she said.

Yikes.

I nodded. “Okay then. Meet me at Central Station at eleven o’clock tonight.”

“Why there?” she asked flatly.

“It’s a safe place for me,” I said, backing away. “See you then. Rest of the beer’s yours.”

Turning my back on her, I strode out of the bar, only checking to see if she was following when I’d walked half a block toward the mechanic. Seeing the coast was clear, I broke into a run.

The rest of my day off was wasted in a fugue of nervous paranoia.

From the restaurant, I went straight to the mechanic to pick up my car, which, they claimed, was running fine. I’d recounted its strange stall-out, but they couldn’t find anything in the car’s computer to indicate such a thing had occurred. Best explanation they could offer was that the key fob was in my pocket when I left the vehicle and it had automatically shut down, as it was supposed to. It was a likely theory, except that I never had the fob on my person; I kept it in my backpack, attached to a little clip within the front pocket—all the keyless functions of the car were controlled through an app on my phone. I always had my backpack with me, so it was never an issue. Wasn’t worth explaining all of that, so I simply paid the bill, which seemed much higher than it should’ve been for an issue that didn’t exist, and drove straight home.

Inside my apartment, I could barely sit still. Every noise in the building, every voice and slamming door was potentially Artice come to exact her revenge on me for being snubbed. I tried to convince myself I had at least until eleven o’clock that evening before she realized I wouldn’t be meeting her, but that did little to soothe me. For some reason, I was convinced she knew I’d been lying to her. Eventually, long after our meeting deadline had passed, I fell asleep, sprawled out on my sofa in front of the TV.

The following day, I was almost able to convince myself I’d imagined my interactions with Artice. I knew that wasn’t the case, but I no longer feared she would kick my door in and carry me from my apartment to join her imaginary crusade to save the planet. So I went to work.

My first few fares of the day were the usual morning work commutes, the most exciting part of which was the guarantee of gridlocked traffic. Closer to lunch, I got a call to take a chatty elderly woman to the airport, which was a decent enough fare. For the entire ride, the woman, identified through the app as Eunice, went on and on about her grandchildren and how their parents couldn’t keep them off their phones. She pointed to my own phone, mounted to my dash and displaying our route, and accused me of over-dependence. I bit my tongue and resisted pointing out she must own a similar device if she was using Ridely, since the only way to use the service was through its mobile app. The ride was over soon enough, though, and I even wished her a safe flight to wherever the hell she was going. I hadn’t bothered to ask.

The next call came in almost immediately, and, for a moment, I thought the app was malfunctioning. Ridely requests were filtered through what I’m sure was a complex algorithm to ensure riders were assigned a driver as quickly and efficiently as possible. To the best of my knowledge, it would select the closest available driver to a requested location. Which was why the new request puzzled me. It was on the other side of the city, in one of the few areas I’d never been to. No way was I the only driver on the clock at that time. Still, the app compensated for the extra travel distance for me to get to the client and automatically added a few bucks to the fare on my behalf. Sighing, I accepted the ride and drove away from the airport.

Nearly half an hour later, I found myself rolling through what had to be the most run-down neighborhood in the city. Dilapidated houses sparsely populated the street I was on, which was empty, many of the lots between them either vacant or bearing the ruins of houses collapsed in on themselves. It was like the entire neighborhood had been abandoned and wiped from city records. I didn’t think these sorts of areas existed. I kept expecting to encounter rough-looking kids on bikes, or maybe a gathering of vagrants, possibly a cult. But there didn’t appear to be another living soul anywhere around.

My map directed me to turn right in a couple hundred feet. Suddenly feeling paranoid, I stopped the car well before the turn, not bothering to pull over to the side or turn on my hazard lights. It was broad daylight, but it might as well have been after midnight for all the anxiety I felt. I was honestly stunned nobody had emerged from behind a crumbling wall to jack my car. The blue dot on my phone screen mocked me, dared me to turn the corner and see who was waiting for me.

I almost turned around. But I thought about the lost fare, the gas spent on getting here—though my Camry got exceptional mileage—and the drop in ranking I would suffer if I were to abandon a ride so long after accepting it. Wouldn’t be the end of the world, and I was sure I would still be busy enough to handle all my expenses, but I was already only barely making ends meet as it was. Taking Artice out for lunch had used literally all of my discretionary spending for the rest of the month. I was in no position to turn down work. So, convincing myself I was worrying for no reason, I drove on, turning the corner confidently.

I pulled up in front of one of the bigger houses in the neighborhood, though it looked like it was only barely standing. The roof was sunken in, the dirt-brown brickwork of the walls crumbling, and the front porch seemed to have liquefied over time. Weeds and dried grass grew in a hazardous tangle around the front yard. Nobody was around.

“I swear to God, if nobody shows up …” I muttered, touching the button on my screen to indicate I’d arrived.

Less than a minute later, a figure emerged from around the side of the house. Not a comforting sight, but I supposed getting out the front door would be a challenge with the porch having been reduced to splinters and debris. The figure was bathed in the shadow of the house, and I could make out none of its features.

Movement from the other side of the house stole my attention, and I looked to see another person coming around to the front. Reasonable explanations were fast becoming hard to come up with. I moved my hand to the shifter, ready to drop the car into drive and tear out of there the instant I thought something was up.

The first figure came close enough to the car for me to see him in detail. He wore a long, billowing coat of bright green and a short, triangular hat, also green. There was a symbol on the front of his hat I couldn’t quite make out. It looked almost like a square root symbol, like that on a calculator, but more squiggly and embellished. The man strode toward the car in a carefree manner that indicated he was completely at home in this neighborhood. I chalked that up as another red flag but still made no move to go anywhere.

At the other side of the house, the second person emerged from shadow, and I saw he wore the same sort of long coat, though his was brown. He wore no hat, rocking a completely bald head that gleamed in the sunlight.

They looked like cosplayers, people who dress up as their favorite characters from movies, comics, cartoons, and whatnot. Was there a convention in town? I hadn’t heard anything, but it’s not like I paid any attention to anything except my books and my work.

The first guy, the one in green, waited at the rear passenger-side door until the guy in brown approached the door behind the driver’s seat. They opened their doors in unison, as if they’d been practicing, which only further convinced me they were in costume. An elephantine weight left my shoulders.

“Hi, guys,” I said, feeling almost giddy with relief.

They said nothing in return. Staying in character, I supposed.

I tapped my phone to say I’d picked up my fare, ready to drive them back into the city to the arena, or wherever their convention was being held. But the blue line on my screen led us in the opposite direction of the city, out into the middle of nowhere.

“Going to a party?” I asked, trying not to think of what else might be waiting at the end of our route.

No response.

Fine. I put the car in gear and started driving, trying to convince myself the odds of getting two batshit crazy fares in the same week were astronomical. Part of me wondered if Artice might be going to the same convention as these guys. Her costume would fit right in with theirs.

Trying my best to ignore the passengers in the back seat, I put on some music and drove.

Previous - Chapter 2: “Can We Talk?”

Next - Chapter 4: “This Does Not Look Like a Convention”

Next week: Ozzy fights to stay alive in his baffling new environment.

Thank you so much for reading Ozzy’s Almanac of Other Worlds. How are you enjoying the story so far? Any predictions about what’s in store for Ozzy? Drop your thoughts in the comment section.

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“Okay,” I said, voice trembling beyond my control, “here we are.”

Keeping the car in drive, I pressed the door unlock button so she’d get the hint. I hadn’t had the courage to bring …

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“Do you know where you’re going?”

I snapped my eyes up to the rearview, searching in the dimness of the back seat for the source of the voice.

“Sure,” I said, doing my best to suppress a yawn, and pretending I hadn’t just been falling asleep behind the wheel. “And even if I didn’t, the Ridely app gives me the most direct route.”

I absolutely knew where I was going. I’d been driving these streets for ages, professionally for the last five years or so, if you could call driving for a ride-share app a profession.

“You were just going really slow for a while,” the kid in the back seat said. He’d seemed pretty drunk when I picked him up in front of the crowded bar ten minutes ago. Apparently not so drunk he didn’t notice his driver dozing off on him.

“Thought I saw someone I knew,” I said, hoping the kid also didn’t realize the streets in this neighborhood were barren at this time of night.

He made a vague noise in the back of his throat and I once more searched the darkness in the rearview for his face, if only to assure him I was fully conscious.

It was well past two in the morning and I’d been driving since noon that day with an hour reprieve around dinner time, only because the app forced its drivers to take mandatory breaks every eight hours. Long days were the only way to make any money in that job. And by the time I paid for gas, insurance, and vehicle maintenance I still took home a pittance. I told myself I enjoyed it because I could pretend I was my own boss, and, at one time in my life, I really did like driving. Sure, I had to work a minimum number of hours a week, and I was still subject to Ridely’s policies, and they took a significant portion of each of my fares, and forbade any form of gratuity, and would deactivate my profile at the slightest hint of me accepting a tip, but at least I didn’t have to be at work at a certain time and report to a boss like the rest of the Monday-to-Friday, nine-to-five drones with their job security, fair wages, and benefits.

I dropped the kid off in front of his apartment and watched him stumble to the door. He threw a hand up in farewell, right before throwing his dinner up all over the sidewalk. Dodged that one. I’d had people puke in my car a number of times and it always occurred close to when I was considering calling it a night, forcing me to spend an extra hour or two at the coin-op do-it-yourself carwash around the corner from my place.

“My lucky night,” I muttered to myself as I reached forward to sign out of the app, ending my shift.

My fingertip was less than an inch from the screen when my phone started blinging with an alert for a new ride.

“You kidding me?” I said to it.

Bling-bling-bling-bling, it said back.

I could skip the ride request and call it a night. Ridely’s policies allowed for five ignored rides every twelve hours. Ignoring a fare, however, meant I would drop significantly in local rankings and lose my place in the priority queue, earning me fewer fares and, consequently, less money. Driving for Ridely was a competitive gig. Not only did I have to compete with hundreds of other Ridely drivers, but there were also other ride-share apps to contend with, taxis, public transportation, and the odd rickshaw. Still, I almost skipped that ride. Almost. Can’t say things would have turned out much different if I’d pressed the ignore button instead of accepting the fare, but I would have stood a much better chance at avoiding what was to come.

I pressed accept and the screen lit up in a happy green glow that gave way to a map with a blue line drawn from where I was parked to the pickup location of my next fare. My heart sank when I saw where I was to go while my stomach tensed up in dread as I grabbed another Blastix energy drink from the cooler I kept in the passenger seat. It was my fifth energy drink since starting that day, not including my morning coffees, and there was a second of clearheaded apprehension as I stuck the can between my thighs and worked my fingertip under the tab. Shoving any concern for my own health aside, I cracked the drink and guzzled half the can, hardly tasting the artificial lime flavor and only feeling something like a plateau in my energy, which had been in free-fall for the last hour.

Sipping at the second half of the drink, I guided my car back into nonexistent traffic and headed in the direction of my next fare. It was at the other end of the city, in an industrial complex I’d been to once or twice in the light of day, picking factory grunts up from work. It was a strange place to be getting a call to at almost three in the morning, but I assumed it must be a nightshift security guard going home sick or maybe a CEO burning the midnight oil.

I’d been driving in silence for most of the night—to have one’s car stereo on was to invite passengers to request the absolute worst sort of music—but decided to turn on the radio in an attempt to stay alert. I skipped past several stations playing the worst sort of house music, avoided a classical music station apt to put me to sleep, and landed on a late-night talk show.

“… And nobody’s saying anything about it,” a guy with a thick southern accent was saying.

“So this ship,” a silky-voiced man, who I presumed to be the host of the show, said, “just appeared out of nowhere and is on a collision course with Earth? Why wouldn’t NASA or the ESA say something? Won’t some backyard astronomer spot it?”

“It’s more than likely employing a form of cloaking technology,” the caller said. “And it didn’t appear out of nowhere, it came through a wormhole. That’s how it got close so fast.”

I switched the radio off, concerned for my own sanity. Every now and then I would indulge in late-night paranormal talk radio shows, but I was worried my exhaustion might lead me to start believing some of the nonsense they discussed.

The city passed in a steady stream of traffic and street lights, the occasional pair of headlights, and more than a few questionable souls wandering the sidewalks and gutters. It all blurred together and I caught myself being hypnotized by the lights more than once, in spite of the caffeine, taurine, sugar, B-vitamins, guarana, ginseng, and whatever else Blastix crammed into their drinks. By the time I turned onto the industrial road leading into the cluster of warehouses and factories, I was barely keeping my eyes open and there was a concerning buzzing in my ears.

I pulled my car up to the spot indicated on my map by a little blue dot and put the vehicle into park with all the relief of a commercial air pilot who’d just landed a flaming 747 full of babies on a runway of active landmines.

Nobody was there. At first I was angry—what a waste of time!—but that was probably the Blastix thinking for me. If nobody showed up within five minutes of my arrival, policy stated I could cancel the ride and leave with impunity. At that point, I probably wouldn’t have even bothered driving away; I’d just lean the seat back and fall asleep right there. Let the factory’s morning shift find me unconscious right outside the front doors. Hopefully they’d leave me alone and let me sleep the day away as my body and mind were vehemently demanding.

With two minutes to go on the abandoned ride clock, my heartbeat sped up. I was so happy, I actually felt more awake. Good ol’ endorphins to the rescue. I’d be on my way to bed in no time. Fifteen minutes to get home from here, maybe less at this time of night, which meant only twenty minutes until sweet sleep took me.

With thirty seconds on the clock, I put my car in drive and hovered my thumb over the cancel button. I watched the seconds tick by, feeling like a kid who’d just been granted an extra month of summer vacation.

At fifteen seconds to go, a hulking, muscular-looking shadow approached and, an instant later, the back door opened and all my energy fled like so much toilet water down the drain. When the figure got in my car, the chassis dropped about a foot closer to the ground. Springs I didn’t even know existed in my little car squealed like cats in a juice press. I glanced in the rearview and, in the dim light, could only tell all but a sliver of the rear windshield was being blocked by the dominating figure in the back seat, who appeared as nothing more than an enormous shadow.

I gulped, afraid, if not of the sheer size of the person who’d just entered my car, then of the accompanying silence. No greeting or anything. Hand shaking, I reached out and tapped the button on my phone screen to indicate I’d picked up my fare. The route populated in my map and, when I saw where we were going, all anxiety fled to make room for the rage that came storming in.

“Sorry,” I said, doing my best not to grit my teeth, “I think you entered your destination incorrectly. Mind updating it on your end? If I do it, they have to investigate to make sure I wasn’t fudging the mileage and they’ll withhold the fare until their investigation is complete, which is never quick. Sounds petty but I really need the money if I want to eat and pay rent this month.”

“The destination is correct,” the person in the back seat said.

The voice—her voice—took me off guard. I would have bet a thousand bucks it was a dude who’d gotten into my car, a conviction based solely on the muscle mass apparent in her figure when I’d glimpsed her silhouette. I forced myself to focus on the map displayed on my phone screen and the incredibly short blue line leading from our location to a similar building two blocks away.

“For real?” I said, unable to conceal my frustration. “You can walk this in five minutes.”

“I need you to drive me,” she said in a surprisingly soft voice.

Something occurred to me then.

“Oh man, I’m sorry,” I said, embarrassed. “If it’s a mobility issue, I apologize. I’m just really tired. It’s no problem.” I put the car in gear.

“I can walk just fine,” my fare said.

Easing the car back out into the empty lane, I pretended not to have heard her.

“I need to speak with you, Oz.”

Somehow I managed not to slam on the brakes at the mention of my nickname. My real name, Oslo, shows up on the app when I’m assigned as someone’s driver. The fare gets a message saying to look out for Oslo in a blue Camry with license plate blah-blah-blah. Nowhere does it mention my nickname—Ozzy or Oz—which I typically introduced myself as in social settings. In fact, I only really used my real name on legal documents. Not a huge stretch for her to have figured out my nickname, but it, along with her unexpected appearance and the strange ride request, gave me a start.

“About what?” I asked, not quite daring to challenge her on where she was getting her information.

“Tough to know where to start.”

“I get that,” I said, turning the corner onto the street bearing our destination. Ride was almost half over already; I could handle this. “Maybe you can try for another driver after I drop you off. By the time they arrive, you might have a better idea of what to say.”

“I need to speak with you,” she said, “not another driver.”

Reasonable responses escaped me, so I stayed quiet, focusing on keeping the car between the lines on the road for the next four hundred yards or so until we arrived at the next stop in her late-night warehouse hopping adventure.

With about a hundred yards left in our trip—I could see our destination straight ahead—she said, “Life as you know it ends today.”

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Welcome!

***Scroll down for Chapter Index***

Ozzy’s Almanac of Other Worlds is an original serialized science-fiction novel brought to you one chapter at a time, every week:

Ozzy is just trying to make a living when he accepts one last fare at the end of a long shift as a ride share driver. Doesn’t take long for his strange—and intimidating—passenger to tell him he is the only person capable of saving humanity from imminent destruction. Then, she shoves him through a portal. If Ozzy is to accept his calling, he must hop from world to world, exploring potential new dwelling places for the surviving human race.

Chapter Index

***Chapters 1-6 will remain free indefinitely. All other chapters will remain free for a month after publication, after which they will require a paid subscription to access.***

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The contest was prompt-based and limited to a strict word count. I’ve left the story unchanged, though I did do a quick pass for grammar. I believe the contest limit was 1,000 words, though I might have added a handful to expand on some pretty tight sentences. The idea was to use three prompts (a genre, a character, and an object) to craft an original story. I’ll list the prompts below, in case you’re curious.

I hope you enjoy. Let me know what you think. Time travel is not normally a topic I would willingly tackle. The word limit did not make the task any easier.

Prompts: Genre - time travel, Character - a bookworm, Object - shackles

The Book of Minutes

by Christopher Sweet

The tome, cumbersome as ever, tugs at Avery, pulling her what feels like down but is really—what?—out? For the thousandth time, she wishes she’d affixed it to one of her legs instead of her left wrist. Couldn’t have known, but the regret remains.

A filthy quarter plinks onto the sidewalk in front of her face, dropped by one of the thousands of pedestrians passing by. Of course she looks homeless. Disheveled, filthy, and lying in a heap on Madison Avenue in what she suspects is the late 1980s. Hasn’t bothered asking anyone. She knew this isn’t when she wants to be the instant the book dropped her here.

Soon it will pull her away. It’s entirely possible for her to do so herself, but she’s still mad at the book. Doesn’t want to acknowledge it, let alone give it the satisfaction of turning its pages.

The Book of Minutes.

Evaluating the collection of a woman who’d disappeared nine years earlier, Avery had been unable to help herself, as she’d often been powerless to resist a particularly intriguing volume. More than a collector, she is—was—addicted to books. Not just literature, but the actual pages and ink and bindings. Their smell, an aroma unlike anything else in space or time. It was what had driven her for the last decade of her previous life, that which she’d spent within time. The long chain dangling from the book’s spine had felt like a dare, a joke. She’d been puzzled and delighted when the first page refused to turn, the text on that impossibly pristine sheet taunting her:

Tether yourself to proceed. Let slip the temporal chains which bind you.

Undaunted and curious as ever, Avery had closed the shackle over her left wrist, certain if no key was available, Daniel would be able to cut it off her.

The thought of him melts the ennui from her heart, invigorating her. She pushes herself into a sitting position, finally noticing her bed of cigarette butts and trash. If she can make it to his—their—time, and all the way back to Austin, maybe he can help free her from the Book of Minutes. Any time after August 2025 will do. She’s been almost every-when else in time by now and longs for the global warming, doomscrolling, and consumerism of the 2020s.

For the last countless number of tumbles through time, Avery has let the book drag her along on its own schedule. If she doesn’t turn the pages herself, the book grows heavier, weighing her down until she can’t move. Not long after she’s immobilized, it will melt through whatever surface it lies upon, pulling her along with it.

There is no taming the book.

She uses both hands to tug on the chain, spreading her legs out and pulling the book between them, heedless now of those passing her by, cursing her both under their breath and in the expletive-saturated shouts one could only hear in 80s Manhattan.

The pages are blank and unnumbered. She’s tried making notes on them, but the ink vanishes after each tumble. For a while, she’d been counting the pages, but then she’d tried the same page twice in a row and wound up in two very different times.

There is no outfoxing the book.

A third of the way through, maybe five hundred pages in, she stops. Places her hand on the perfectly smooth, cream-colored paper. It takes only a second for her to tumble, as she’s taken to calling it, though it feels more like being sucked into a whirlpool. The book always knows when she’s ready, though it seldom cares if she’s not.

The space between time is a cascade of indescribable colors, gone as fast as they manifest. Mercifully, tumbling is an almost instantaneous process.

It’s immediately obvious she’s gone forward in time. Much farther than ever before. The book has never brought her beyond her own time. She thought future time travel impossible until now.

She is still in the same place on Madison Avenue, though this is New York as she’s never seen it. Not a soul in sight. Streets empty, though a few cars are parked along the curb. Dark out.

Across the road, one of those stainless-steel public restrooms, the ones that look like dislocated elevator cars. The framed poster next to the door catches her eye. She crosses the road, gaze locked on the bright orange text. Her breath catches when she can finally make out what it says.

Avery forces herself to look up, to regard a sky she’s always ignored amid so many skyscrapers. There it is. Impossible to determine how far out, though it looks like she can reach out and touch it. Gives her vertigo, staring into the craters magnified by Earth’s atmosphere. Gigantic fissures spread throughout it like chain lightning.

The poster reads:

Abandon Earth! Moon to strike on or around June 14, 2027. Secure your pass aboard an escape fleet vessel today!

Spray-painted under this:

Underground on Earth is safer. Sub-shelters still have room. Don’t risk your life on a hastily constructed space vessel.

The digital display over the bathroom door says it’s June 12, 2027, 11:23 AM.

A sudden lightness on her arm draws her attention downward. The shackle she’s worn for countless eons outside of time has released itself and now dangles from the book she holds under her arm. Avery drops to the ground, sitting with her back against the restroom wall, and flips the book open. It only opens to the back page. She reads the words there several times before trying in vain to re-attach the clasp over her wrist, then legs, even her throat. No use. The book is done. It says as much on the only page she can now access. Two words, taunting her as doom closes in from above:

The End.

If you’ve happened to stumble across this with absolutely no context whatsoever, I’ll attempt to remedy any gaps in knowledge. My name is Christopher Sweet. I am forty-something, the father of three incredible boys (with a fourth baby due in just a few weeks), husband to the beautiful and talented Annie Sweet, author of speculative fiction, small-town supply teacher, and the operations manager of my family’s campground, which sits on a peaceful river in New Brunswick. I’ve been telling stories since I was old enough to pick up a pencil, and probably well before that. At some point in 2019, with the support of my awesome wife, I finally started writing my first novel, The Boy in the Canvas—a blend of magical realism and gothic horror. The process took somewhere around three years and, early in 2022, I published my very first novel.

It felt great, but I was already thinking of the next one. Now, about four-and-a-half years after that first book was published, I have five books out in the world, three of which are full-length novels. My latest is a sci-fi / horror about a disgraced rock band coming together for one last show, and creating a rift between worlds in the process.

Part of the problem with having a creative mind is that the ideas don’t stop coming just because I already have projects on the go or absolutely need to edit one of my completed manuscripts. What’s a writer to do? One way to combat the onslaught of ideas I’m blessed with is to write them down in my notebook or, if that isn’t handy, in my Notes app, which is much less preferable. This helps keep them from staging an uprising in my mind but does not stifle them completely. Which is why I have three completed novels waiting for some revision love and still can’t stop myself from thinking about and, inevitably, writing even more. Writing short stories helps a bit. They’re sort of the methadone of my creative life. But not everything can be contained in a short story. Which brings me to my (primary) reason for finally starting a Substack.

Years ago, a bit before I started writing my first novel, I took several semesters of Screenwriting at University of Toronto, earning me a fancy virtual certificate. I quickly caught the screenwriting bug and wound up writing half a dozen screenplays of varying quality and about as many television pilots. I shopped some stuff around a bit, but I am not so great at tooting my own horn and found it difficult to confidently present my screenplays. I had some friends in “the industry” and was chatting with several parties about maybe producing one of my screenplays, but then a certain uber-contagious disease shut down most businesses and pretty much all film sets. Like many in those days, my hopes were dashed. The upside to this is that I was encouraged to put concerted effort into my novel. Eventually, of course, the lockdown ended. By then, my wife and I had made the decision to pull up stakes and move east to go into business with my parents. We left bustling Hamilton, Ontario behind and moved to what I’ve taken to thinking of as our own Shire in a tiny town in the Acadian Peninsula of New Brunswick. The change in lifestyle and location has afforded me much more time to dedicate to my writing. With winters off, aside from occasional substitute teaching gigs, I’ve got plenty of time to write—and still this doesn’t ever seem like enough. Throughout the summer, when we’re at our busiest with the campground, I find time here and there to revise existing work and write new material in shorter bursts.

So…?

Ah, yes. The point. We’re coming to it.

Many of the screenplays (and lots of other stuff I’ve written) will never see the light of day, a fact I’ve made peace with. Some of the things I wrote, however, have become lodged in my mind, needling at me to release them from the confines of their digital imprisonment on my hard drive.

One such piece in particular, a television pilot I wrote years ago, stubbornly rises to the top of the murky waters of my creative mind no matter how deep I shove it back down. I’ve grown tired of fighting it and believe I’ve found a method of sharing and expanding it that will satisfy myself, the story, and, hopefully, you.

I’ll be back shortly with a dedicated post to share the title and a little synopsis to whet your appetite. It’s a horror, like much of the stuff I write.

This is going to be a serialized novel, free to begin with. At some point in the process, archived chapters and more will be available with a subscription. You can pledge (I think?) to subscribe if you wish, but you won’t miss out on anything if you choose to wait until you absolutely have to. The plan for now is to make all chapters (episodes?) free when they first come out. This all requires the sort of contemplation I don’t enjoy engaging in but bills must be paid and our growing army of monsters demand to be fed. Don’t worry, though, I’ll keep things reasonable.

For now…

… Keep an eye on this page. Please do subscribe, as that will greatly soothe my delicate ego, and probably has some more practical benefits.

If you’d like to check out my existing body of work, you can head to my website by clicking the appropriate button below, or zip over to my Amazon Author’s page and purchase several dozen copies of each of my books. They make excellent gifts, bludgeons, coasters, paperweights, doorstops, and kindling. Seriously, though, I appreciate each and every reader who takes a chance on my work.

My Website

Amazon Author Page

So that’s it. Stay tuned. Visit my socials if you wish, though they’re mostly full of pictures of the various birds, bugs, and beasts I come across at the campground I call home: Instagram, Facebook, TikTok.

You’ll hear from me soon.

-Christopher Sweet