LITMIR.BIZ

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      Copyright Information

      Copyright © 1994 by Lawrence Watt-Evans. This edition copyright © 2003 by Lawrence Watt-Evans. All rights reserved.

      Published by Wildside Press LLC.

      www.wildsidebooks.com

      Dedication

      For Julie—

       because she’s long overdue for another.

      Chapter One

      He was changing lanes, cutting in front of a silver-grey Toyota, when he suddenly felt as if he were being watched, as if someone were desperately trying to get his attention. He was alone in the car, though. He knew he was alone in the car.

      He swerved back into line and checked his mirrors.

      Everything looked normal.

      He shook his head, puzzled, and began looking for another opening. His appointment was in five minutes, and he had three miles to go on the highway, another through the city streets. He wasn’t going to make it on time, but all the same, he didn’t want to be any later than necessary. He ignored the odd sensation, waiting for it to go away.

      It refused. Instead of fading, it nagged at him like a sore tooth. Someone was watching him, somehow.

      When he stopped at a light he looked in the back seat, just in case; of course, no one was there. For a moment he even thought about checking the trunk when he parked, but then he shook his head again. That was ridiculous.

      The feeling was very definite. It was almost like one of those psychic things he’d read about—but he didn’t believe in those.

      The feeling was there, and it wouldn’t go away.

      He forced himself to ignore it.

      * * * *

      “Mommy?” Angela, seated cross-legged on the kitchen floor with her Raggedy Ann doll sprawled on her lap, looked up at her mother.

      “Yes, honey?” Margaret Thompson went on scrubbing the saucepan, trying to get out every trace of the burnt-on cheese sauce.

      “Mr. Nobody’s talkin’ to me again.”

      “Oh?” Margaret answered, not really listening. “What’s he saying?” She peered critically at the pan, decided it would do, and put it in the drainer.

      “He’s in terrible trouble, Mommy,” Angela told her, quite seriously.

      “What kind of trouble?” Margaret asked, picking a skillet out of the soapy dishwater.

      “There’s this bad monster wants to get him, and eat him up, and make everybody do bad things.”

      Margaret looked down at her daughter. “Angie, there aren’t any monsters. You know that. You tell Mr. Nobody that.”

      “I told him that, Mommy,” Angela said very seriously, “but he just keeps talkin’ about a monster in the shadows.”

      Margaret was a bit startled to hear a phrase like “a monster in the shadows” from her three-year-old, but she didn’t worry about it. Kids pick up all kinds of things, and besides, Angie was almost four now. She was growing up fast. “Well, if he keeps talking about monsters,” Margaret told Angie, “then just don’t listen to him. Tell him to be quiet and stop bothering you with that stuff.”

      “Okay,” Angela said, doubtfully. “I’ll try.”

      * * * *

      PSYCHIC PREDICTS ARMAGEDDON

      Ray Aldridge, noted West Coast psychic advisor, told reporters today that he has it on good authority that Armageddon, the final battle of good and evil, is almost upon us.

      “It was the clearest message I’ve ever gotten from any psychic entity,” Dr. Aldridge reported. “It was a warning sent by beneficent aliens far out in the galaxy, telling me that the powers of darkness are building up their forces for the final conquest of Earth. The aliens who contacted me say that the Galactic Empire they represent has tried to fight back Shadow, as they call it, but has been unsuccessful. It’s up to us, here on Earth, to defeat it.”

      When asked how this evil force could be defeated, and what ordinary people could do that telepathic space aliens could not, Dr. Aldridge admitted, “I don’t have any idea at all.”

      * * * *

      “Got a good one,” the agent at the desk called, holding up an opened letter.

      His partner looked up from the file drawer. “What’s this one say?”

      The man at the desk smiled. “Dear Mr. President,” he read from the letter. “The angels from Venus who have been helping me with my garden called me up yesterday on the special telephone in my head to warn me that we’re in big trouble. The Devil Himself...” He pointed and said, “That’s underlined in red crayon.” Then he continued reading. “The Devil Himself has found out about all the secret messages I’ve been relaying to you, to keep the Chinese from invading and to tell Americans how to grow better carrots, and he’s really mad. I think my neighbor with the sick cat told him. I’m sure she’s a witch or one of them Satan cults. The Venusians are going to fight the old bastard and chase him back to Hell...” The agent paused again and looked up, grinning. “’Hell’ is in all capitals and underlined in red,” he said, before turning his gaze back to the letter. He cleared his throat and continued, “...chase him back to Hell, but they need some help, so if you could send the 82nd Airborne to Goshen, Maryland, that’s where they expect to meet him. Yours Truly, Oram Blaisdell.”

      “Goshen?” the other man asked, bemused. “Why Goshen? Where the heck is it, anyway?”

      “Just north of Gaithersburg, I think,” the reader said. “One of those ritzy suburbs with three-acre estates.”

      “Does this guy live there?” The man by the files knew, intellectually, that the nuts whose letters came to this office sometimes lived in fancy suburbs, but it still didn’t seem right. He expected them to come from either the inner city or the outermost sticks.

      “No, no, of course not,” the man at the desk replied. “He lives in Tennessee somewhere.”

      “Then why’d he pick Goshen? How’d he ever hear of Goshen, Maryland?”

      The man holding the letter shrugged. “Who knows?” he asked. “Why the 82nd? Why Venus? Why carrots?” He tossed the letter aside. “At least that one didn’t have Elvis in it.”

      * * * *

      Pel Brown gave the screwdriver another turn and cursed when it slipped out of the slot and scraped across the metal. He dropped the screwdriver to one side, then brushed at the red-enamelled surface and leaned over to peer at it, wishing the light were better.

      It looked okay.

      Better light might be nice, Pel decided, but what he really wished was that wagons came ready-assembled. Had his father had to put together his old wagon? He’d never thought about that before; just one year there it was, under the Christmas tree, and he’d taken it entirely for granted.

      Well, this one was going to be a birthday present, rather than for Christmas, but Rachel was probably going to take it for granted just as much as he had. And she probably wouldn’t notice if he did scratch the paint. That wasn’t something a six-year-old cared much about.

      She was going to be six. Amazing. Almost ready for first grade.

      Of course, the next school year was still almost four months off, but she would be six tomorrow.

      She still wouldn’t care about scratched paint, though. He sighed and reached for the screwdriver, then froze.

      Standing next to the screwdriver was a... well, a person. Pel hesitated to call it a man, even in his thoughts; it stood just over a foot high, wrapped in a tattered cloak of coarse brown wool, black hair pulled back in a tight braid, revealing oversized pointed ears. It was looking about curiously and uncertainly, taking in the contents of the basement—the furnace, the water heater, the boxes of stored

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