Oh, Friday, is it?

Posted on by hollyfrostgoldportpress

From Holly the Assistant

Well, it’s been that sort of day all around these parts. Everyone’s fine. There were checkups and shipments and pollen and just . . . it was very much a Friday. (Ok, with the pollen, fine might be pushing it, but everyone’s alive and breathing, which is not Nature’s fault: she tried.)

So, please amuse yourselves, or not, with what might be on the other side of that door. And there will be memes tomorrow, bet your bottom dollar there’ll be meming.

28 thoughts on “Oh, Friday, is it?”

  1. On such a sunny day, it is unlikely that there’s a vampire just inside that door. [Crazy Grin]

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  3. Hm. With the weathering of the walls and doors, and the brightness of the sun, it feels Mediterranean. I’m getting the sense of a small chapel, partly neglected but still functioning. Not well lit inside, just a few rows of pews … and an unexpected, small but exquisite work of art. Painting, stained glass, statuary, or something else, I can’t tell, but it’s there.

    I’ve just given somebody the seed of a story. Plant it with care.

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    1. The seed has sprouted, thanks to your idea and having Dragony playing in the background as I finished entering edits on a book.

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  5. Seems like the first day of summer here in ‘America’s Finest City’. No early morning low clouds and fog as they like to say around here.

    On an amusing note, I’ve been ignoring the trad publishing world for 15 years now, but I came across an old story of my wife’s that suited the short horror genre in the tradition of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine that she used to read way back in the 70’s. Just for the heck of it, I decided to send it off. My first shock was their submission guidelines that don’t seem to have changed since 1979. Start halfway down the first page, double space, put page numbers from page 2 on in the upper right hand corner with the name of the story or a keyword. Seriously? Were they planning on printing it out to read? At least they allowed submission via email rather than snail mail with SASE (ask your parents).

    They said their response time averaged 8-10 months, so I kissed the story good-bye expecting to never hear from them. Lo and behold. I submitted it on 5/16 and received my rejection today, 5/10. No there was no time travel involved. I submitted it on 5/10/2024! I guess I got my confirmation as to why it’s not worth it to submit anything to trad publishing without even taking into account woke bias.

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      1. That’s actually what I usually do. We have a local writers’ group headed by a best-selling author. I’ve attended a few sessions, and realized that they’re totally focused on traditional publishing, so I figured I’d experiment.

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  6. “And make sure you put enough of the lamb’s blood on the lintel and door posts so that the Angel of Death can see it. He’s getting on in age and doesn’t see as well as he used to.”

    “Yes, Mother.”

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  7. Having been in a frame of mind to think on religions this week…

    “The door is ajar. It is eternally ajar. But you must enter it of your own will, and with your whole heart.”

    (Somewhat sadly, I DO think too much.)

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  8. Finally found a good pun to go with the doorway picture:

    I’m entranced by that entrance.

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  10. He almost rode right on past the place, despite all his earlier decisions and resolutions. But two things stopped him; the slightly-open door, with its implicit but clear sign of welcome; and the tiny bed of new flowers by its side, that spoke of someone bothering to spend some chilldew from the tall condensers on the edge of town, or even some water from the deepwells under it, to call forth that small bit of life and inviting brightness.

    Sometimes, he remembered hearing somewhere, it’s the smallest things that some of the very largest things hinge on.

    Those two, plus the heaviness of several pennyweights of gold and silver and copper in the bit of looted jewelry in its pouch in his vest pocket; which with all its far-flung associations felt more like a quarter-ton. Except, dropping it by the side of the road seemed… downright cowardly.

    So he slowed and stopped his camel — far better-behaved a beast, he was assured by many and various sources, than its forebears had ever been in generations and centuries previous, but still no model of obedience or of good temperament — and begged it sufficiently to kneel, and tethered it at the hitching-rail as he’d done a thousand times before. (Still had no name for the beast, yet, had never quite convinced himself it’d earned or deserved one.) Walked up to the door of the small but inarguably present church, that (like so many things here on La Reina) stubbornly held on.

    Pushed open the already-cracked-ajar door — “Hello, the house?”

    To enter one of the tidiest and most — economical places of worship he’d ever laid eyes on. Not quite so very compact as a battle-chapel on board a troop transport, yes; but still… remarkably welcoming as a farm-kitchen table laid for a no-holds-barred Easter dinner.

    “Be welcome in this house of God, I’m Father Brown, and how might I help you this fine day?” (He always did feel as if he was telling the tiniest of lies, saying Vern Brown instead of Wernher Braun; but this was very far from his birth world, here, and people and things Germanic remarkably thin on the ground. Communication is, firstly, about saying things people will likely understand when they hear them.)

    “I was figuring you might be up for a bit of confession, if anyone was in here at the church. Since I’m a traveler with somewhat to, well, let go the burden of carrying.” In more ways than one, he said wryly to himself.

    “We can do that here. I regret to tell you we’ve not got the standard kit yet, the booths and all, one of the local cabinetmakers has been meaning to get to that, but with the droughts and floods and droughts…” He let it hang. Here on La Reina Roja, the terraforming had taken with the vigor and tenacity “shotgun” terraforming so often did; if the terra-tweaking to fine-tune the results for human comfort, had not quite done likewise.

    The Red Queen.

    She was a figure of folklore and legend, pictures and statuettes for sale to the few tourists who came down here (mostly ones from starships out of slipdrive to dump heat and recalibrate instruments; after days stuck in a mirrored bubble of existence in the no-ness of slipspace, many passengers did actively and deeply crave seeing the stars, and especially walking a living world, back here in our familiar universe once more). A red-haired young woman in pre-spaceflight Castilian finery. Many of the institutions here gave the nod to her, never mind she was only as real, no more and no less so, as Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny.

    But the ‘Red Queen’ was (Father Brown well knew) originally a nod to that old Reverend Dodgson story — where ‘it takes all the running you can do, just to stay in the same place.’ Welcome to La Reina Roja: registry name something like ‘Far Oaxacan’ if anyone ever bothered to look it up.

    They’d been walking toward the front of the stone-and-wood church, and now came close enough to the altar rail to see a table off to one side, with a heavy black curtain between it and the pews. “We don’t have anything save this old blackout curtain, but it’s typical of people here not to pry. So, would you like me to draw the curtain closed, before we sit down? Or just sit at the table openly together, the way most of my little flock do?”

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  11. (above continued, Part 2/4)

    He smiled. “The table would be fine, I’m used to — well, having a good bit of situational awareness is still comforting to me, as many months as it’s been since I was at the front or even in the service. So let us sit.” And he suited action to words. “Thank you for this in advance, Father. It has been several turns of the farther moon since my last confession. And I have taken the Lord’s name in vain on multiple occasions, and committed a stream of acts of covetousness, being a miner by present trade.” He paused a moment, cleared his throat a little, the way some people do.

    “And this very day, I have broken the Fifth Commandment seven times. At once I must add” — and he pulled the leather pouch from his vest pocket, undid the drawstrings, removed an ornate gold signet ring strung on a thin leather cord and dropped it on to the table between them — “that while in this matter I have broken the law of God, I have not transgressed the law of man.” And as he said it he pulled from his worn, streaked, pale-leather duster’s inner pocket a parchment-paper printed copy of a wanted posting, unfolded it, and laid it open atop the ring.

    Vern’s, Wernher’s, blood ran both cold and hot as he recognized the man and men on it. And the heading, Wanted Dead or Alive for Multiple Murder and Robbery and Battery by the Queen’s Own Rangers — and the footing, as large in type and perhaps even more telling in its old-school frankness.

    To Be Dealt With as Wolves Are. Legal, full open-season, on true outlaws.

    “Yes, Father Brown, you can believe that. See what lies beneath.” The man said it in the same matter-of-fact way of an officer handing in his latest casualty report, of a trans-at fighter pilot copying her latest run’s on-board gun-camera footage and endotelemetry file. While the clergyman felt his own personal storm of reactions rage, close beneath a calm surface.

    He even felt it a bit of a failing of his service, that his hands shook just a visible little as he set aside the paper to inspect the ring that lay underneath it. Yes, it looked like the one; and yes, it was detailed in the way none of the postings or news stories had been, carefully so; in the way a few odd political-sounding postings from the so-called ‘Lord of the Sun’ were ‘signed’ with its dark-inked stamp. “From each according to his means” and so forth, some-such antediluvian tripe, plus Aztec-esque bloody.

    “My son, if this is what you say it is, and it certainly inclines to be as you say — it is quite very valuable, to you, indeed.” Vern tried to keep his voice level and clear, and succeeded. “This is a prince’s ransom.”

    “Yes, about that, Father. The trouble with money and me, since the days of my old service against the Xantippe invasion, is that — we don’t do so very good together. It happens I violated what we, in my old unit, like to call our Twelfth Commandment (and begging your pardon there), which is to say, simply, ‘Do What You Can Live With.’ And I try to do that anyway, and often fail. I suppose I’m just not cut out to be some rich pensioner over in New Lubbock or anything, far less be someone up in ‘polite society’.

    “So, if you could turn this in yourself, be custodian of the reward, in your church’s name or our whole Church’s name, it would amount to quite a blessing to me. I’m just tickled pink that I let myself follow my hunch, and could do the public such a service as to rid us all of Old Yeller and the full half-a-dozen of his inner-hench-circle too.”

    For just an instant, Wernher Braun let himself daydream, what he could do with as much money as that. Then, judiciously, closed the door on it. And tried not to channel his own past, as a Concordat intelligence officer.

    “So, how did all that go down?”

    “I got lucky, Father. I overheard the Yellow Kid and his mob talking in a bar — they weren’t being careful, no opsec at all, they seemed to take it for granted their own reputation for hellraising terror would chill any’un from saying a word or doing a thing. So when I heard they were going to be there, until that noontide, then coming on this way, later — I beat them to it, halfway between, even on my old camel and them in a gravspeeder.”

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  12. (above continued, Part 3/4)

    “Got a commendation, in the war. Got a few parting gifts from the unit, as part of that, coming home to get the medal. So, I had a good longrifle, a mostly-fried gravmine, a few other things. So I laid the mine in the road and waited for their ‘speeder. It doesn’t take much for the pulse to hit a civilian gravfloater hard, even with it no longer milspec. So they dropped by the side of the road, and then just milled around, and I… shot ’em.

    “Only half a mile, no big deal. They had a scrambler, but then a diffusion field don’t do nothing to projectiles, and I had a combustion rifle rather than any sort of energy gun. Like shooting fish in a barrel, really.”

    The hair stood up on Wernher’s neck. Seven out of seven, half a mile, on a mostly-desert road in the (wavy-aired) afternoon. Not exactly the old Sept d’Un Coup of legend, but still..!

    And this man, who’d not ever hinted his name, had not only fallen into old Unit speech, he’d also forgotten how big an honor has to be, for them to bring you all the way home from theater just to receive it… then likely cash you out of the service entirely in further gratitude next.

    The newslines said hero. Only, veterans knew better.

    “So you just shot ’em down, then went and got this ring off his finger?”

    “Didn’t fancy sticking around, might be another speeder o’ theirs coming along. Let the buzzards have ’em, and rightly enough.” And it was like he shifted back, as he’d shifted to being rather a different man, earlier.

    “So, Father, if you would, I’d be much obliged to you and the church here if you’d take this burden off my hands. I’ve done my good deeds, I’ve had my fill of recognition and medals and such, and… I’d rather go back to my claim in the near-outback and go on with my life, such as it is now.”

    It wasn’t as if the priest in Father Braun warred with the person, at all. Rather it was as if the two acted, as one, in a way that left his lordly ego and customary persona invisibly far behind in the dust. “It happens I have a niece, Emily. She was on a train the ‘Sunlord’ and his bunch hit, a decade or so ago; she hadn’t planned on it, she and her friend changed her trip schedule at the last minute. And they — drew his attention, there.

    “As they say sometimes, the largest things can turn on the very smallest.

    “Emily wasn’t maimed, doesn’t even bear any scars anymore, outside, though Amelia, ah, did not make it. But the deeper sort of scars are still there, on the inside, with her; and I have to take a certain personal pleasure in hearing this news you’ve come in here to give me.

    “Though I suppose it still might get her, in a way; these past five years she’s been a close-combat shuttle pilot, at the front. The ‘old’ Emily I knew wouldn’t ever have volunteered for such, but…”

    “But sometimes these things work themselves out, in their own way.” There was a sort of kindness in the man’s voice, but mostly — quiet, emptiness.

    Father Brown fished something out of the pocket of his checked shirt. “I can show you something of her, of what you’ve really done this day.” And handed it to him. In the muted light of the church, especially with the blackout curtain hanging off to one side, it looked only a photograph. Of someone in a flight suit under a pressure-survival suit, grinning from ear to ear. But yet, with a certain look in her eyes, far back of all that…

    “You know I want you to take this, Father. The ring and all goes with it. You know I respect the seal of the confessional, and I know you must too.”

    “Yes, my son, I do. And though I might not look it, I’m old enough to be your father in the ordinary way, or Emily’s either. So, I’ll do what you ask, and set the money aside for the church, here and on La Reina. Though you’ll have to let me set much of it aside for combat veterans. Like you, like Emily. And if you ever come back, you can even have much of it. They call it money laundering, but seldom could it ever be in better cause…

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  13. (above concluded, Part 4/4)

    “And if I ever do see you again, for the first time, I’ll be very glad to meet you, as a veteran of our war with the Xantippe spaceweasels, and one who knows these things close up. Likely a good man, to have in a bad spot, if things go as they sometimes do? But of course, I’d have to meet you to do any of that; so try not to stay in seclusion on your claim forever.

    “No man is an island, my son. And ours is a religion of redemption. No one is ever lost completely; no one is so far gone as to never come back. Not you, not Emily Cartwright, none of us. Take it from someone who’s been to it, and back.” And for a moment the old intel officer did stare at him.

    The man smiled, a real smile. “Yes, I do believe that you have. Here, this is probably important to you.” He held out the round, palm-size print.

    “No, that’s a copy, my son. Keep it, if you will, with my compliments; as a token, if you’d allow, of how far you can go out, and yet come home.

    “And no, I’m not trying to set you two up romantically, or anything like. It’s just that you have the same look in your eyes that she’s had in hers ever since… she woke up in the hospital, after. Never seen it in anyone else, really, and in my former life as an intel officer, I saw plenty.”

    “I seem to have missed the part where you give me a penance.”

    “No, it seems to me that what you did this day, that so many others could not manage or did not even try to do — was your penance. Or part of it. For what you said, doing what needed doing, instead of what you could live with, the way you were and knew how to. Keep on, and know you are not lost and know you are not alone. Unless you insist on it, Gospodin Ostrov.”

    The man smiled, almost grinned, and got up from the table. “Thank you for taking my burden from me, Father. This day’s, at least. Perhaps soon we’ll meet again for the very first time.”

    And Father Brown did grin, ear to ear. “Go with God, my son, and always.”

    The man walked through the cool, welcome, cozy dimness of the church. And stepped outside into the dazzling-bright sunlight, fully expecting it to hit him like a blow. But it did not; instead it embraced him, and warmly.

    He looked at the picture he held still in his hand, and started just a bit in surprise. It wasn’t only a flat print, after all; it was a white-light semihologram, and he could see far more of who Emily was, now. There was even a caption around the edge: Pilot Officer Emily Eilidh Cartwright. May 19, 2735, Opzone 77213. Milspeak for, we’ll tell you where after the war.

    Something, in her eyes. Deep inside. What he saw, when he dared a mirror.

    And now it did hit him like a blow: that he and she were at opposite ends of the same wound. The ‘Aztec Lord of the Sun’ had started something with her; and he, himself, had finished it for good today.

    And it hit him again: as a close-support shuttle pilot, she would be doing insertions and retrievals — the kind that he and his unit had needed, on that nasty little Xantippe-infested world, and not gotten. She was in the business now of providing what he’d needed, once… just as he’d done, for her and for so many uncounted others on La Reina, this very afternoon.

    No, they really ought to talk, sometime. Him, and her. To someone who each the other, could and would finally understand. Who knew beyond-innocence.

    Michael Darling, 337th-ever Human Concordat Distinguished Service Cross recipient and truly eldritch-class marksman, looked at the flowers again.

    Sometimes, the largest of things do hinge on the very smallest ones.

    “Mister Island has given up his title; now he’s just You, There, Man.” He said it in Russian, of course, to echo what his friend, Father Brown who he’d not quite really ever met yet, had said to him just now.

    And for an instant, his mind said uncle-in-law instead. Then his mind, in its discreet, protective way drew a blackout curtain across that. For now.

    “Come on, Beelzebub, kneel for me. Yes, now, you rag-headed rug merchant of a misshapen mutant mule. I have things to think about, ones I can’t possibly properly and rightly think about here in town. Kneel, camel!”

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