Hub - Issue 16 Read online

  All sorts of things turned out to be useful. All sorts of memories. We cooked long-forgotten recipes and put on lost plays. The ones who could paint and draw were especially busy, summoning in oils and charcoal their returning memories and the memories of others. We studied the ocean and the spice. The ocean is thickly inhabited, but we still can not determine which creature, or combination of creatures, creates saffron. We have studied it for decades and we would have studied it for decades more.

  Then we heard the attention of two empires turn in our direction.

  We've tried to decipher the origins of your war, but with few results. Perhaps you have dipped your toes into a pool that was already claimed, and so began the Chaser War. You are like two men yawning and stretching on a train, both sleepily going in the same direction but irate when your arms inadvertently cross, so one of you punches the other until he is pulp. I told you we didn't make much sense of it. But we could see you losing, and flailing, and hoping, and we could see you heading this way. We had to prepare. Would you have believed us if we told you we had nothing? Would you have stayed away? I didn't think so.

  We loaded our ships with our children and our belongings. Most of our adults were able to fit on the ships as well. We saved as many as we could. And saffron. Some has been sent forward, with the refugees. But so much remained and more will now never be created. Salty spice. Like its namesake, the dried stigma of a crocus, crushed between your fingers and lost to the wind. Now it is a sweet thing that none will taste.

  They've gone ahead. We've stayed behind. Except for me (I am the leader), we are an even number of men and women, married couples, though I doubt you could detect this. We are reserved and our rules are obscure but they do not dull our passions. The connections between us had sizzled and burned. They gave off light and they kept everybody warm. But we all know what it meant to stay here, and your presence, though expected, has unnerved us. Our thoughts of time stretch out in both directions, forward and back. Our love stretches the small measured gap that electricity can jump across. The women are gathering favorite things to bring to the quarters where we all huddle close together. The men have had to be persuaded not to kill you. Perhaps you deserve it. We spend our days browsing through our memories like you'd thumb through an old filing cabinet. All the marvelous little discoveries that we brought with us in bundles and crates. It makes us very sad.

  Regardless, we stayed, mostly to hope you would not arrive. We hoped we would one day call our ships to say the coast was clear, and they could return. We stayed because this is our home. We stayed because there was no room on the departing ships. We stayed to negotiate. We couldn't bear to leave the ocean. A million fractured reasons. No reason. Who exactly are these killers you've led to us? What is your war called again? Are you even a little bit sorry?

  Vinca felt bad. That was no way to end. She was happy to see that Alban's attention had drifted off halfway through. Saffron could be very absorbing. He smiled and his memories were happy. The process was hard to focus at first. He tuned through static and strife. Then a private, beloved day mistily emerged. He squinted, and like seeing a photograph taken through the poorest of telescopes, he remembered.

  Everything went quiet and the silence brought him back. They could hear the creatures in the ocean breathe through their avid openings. Alban pointed back toward the town.

  "Go to the capsule. Escape."

  "The capsule doesn't work. The Chasers disabled that too. We thought they might miss it, but they didn't." Vinca appreciated the thought.

  "Is that how the story ends? We all die?"

  "Dying is mandatory. Our research suggests it's like that on all worlds. Law of nature."

  She laughed and continued, "Is that why you're here? To make it less so?"

  "I thought so," he said. "It seemed like a good idea at the time."

  First came projectiles. They roared down and turned metal into crumbs.

  "Oh no, look! Part of a building. The bauxite miners built that. It's all native aluminum."

  Alban grabbed her arm and pulled her down behind a boulder. She couldn't see what was happening to the town, but the noise was terrible. Even when it stopped, he held her down and wouldn't let her look. Everything was silent for long minutes. Then a far-off keening filled the air and their eyes met. Despite the uniform, Alban didn't look like a soldier anymore. He smiled shyly with half his mouth and his sandy hair tousled into his eyes. Vinca thought they could have been friends.

  "So," Alban said, "Tell me a little about this religion of yours."

  Vinca decided they were friends.

  "They didn't give you a pamphlet? Armies love pamphlets." Together they laughed.

  Everything became very loud. Vinca cried a little.

  "We're going to die now, aren't we?" she said. "We're really going to die." Alban and Vinca held hands. The keening arrived.

  And there they were, at the finish of the world. A little thing, dying. It was a big push to go a small distance. The unmet enemy's weapons were strong. The sea resisted, but even the deepest and smartest ocean had limits. If it had had shoulders it would have shrugged them. Its surface knew tranquility for so many eons, until something landed on it and then another something followed. The homeward war had ended and the Chasers chased and caught. The soldiers and the Scri'ibe had earnestly served their various masters, generals and scholars and wayward kings, but every odalisque knows that when the palace catches fire, everybody burns.

  The ocean lifted, maybe there was a wave. Goodbye Alban. The end of Vinca. They were pressed like flowers, forgotten in a heavy book that contained many words but little information. Our friends made their last grasps at sensing. They tasted curry and ice and a seldom known spice and then everything got too warm to touch or smell. Alban would try. Nothing left. Skin and a shaving of bone and the inexplicably sturdy cells of pancreas and a sere twist of brain. Abrupt extinction, as if they were dinosaurs or dodos or the last snowy tiger shot for the medicine it did not contain. Their refugees monitored their radios and mourned and voyaged on. They split up to avoid the grasping of the hapless and the many shooting wars. They kept their secrets close and their vehicles well-maintained, speeding free in all directions. They seek a place to pause and remember. They are running yet, with their peculiar plant and their origami memories, serious and fast, like shooting stars.

  About the Author

  Dominae Petrosini has studied fiction and playwriting in the United States and Russia. She is currently finishing her first science fiction novel and writing sketch comedy for the stage, which she sometimes performs with the strange accent that comes from being born in Brooklyn, New York and then living for many years in Austin, Texas.

  Reviews

  Mammoth reviewed by Paul Kane

  Blaze reviewed by Scott Harrison

  Mammoth

  Directed by Tom Cox

  Starring Tom Skerrit, Vincent Ventresca, Summer Glau

  Momentum, £12.99

  ‘It’s gonna be Mammoth!’

  With the announcement of yet another instalment in the Jurassic Park series and ITV’s Primeval drawing in viewers on both sides of the Atlantic, prepare yourself for more prehistoric creature features that Ray Harryhausen could shake a miniature stick at. The first of these to jump on the bandwagon is Mammoth, but is it a hip and knowing reworking of the tired subject matter, or a story not even the 50s B-Movie makers would have touched with a cave-man’s spear?

  The setting for our little romp is initially a Pleistocene museum – no, not the kind you used to play with as a kid and mould into any shape…This one houses relics from Earth’s past, including the skeletons of mammoths. But, as a couple of curious scouts discover, the museum is also home to a partially frozen 40,000-year-old mammoth which the curator, Dr Frank Abernathy (erstwhile Invisible Man Ventresca), is conducting experiments on. He goes too far, though, when he extracts a tiny capsule embedded in the beast and triggers a pulse signal. Cut to outer space, where a probe
is dispatched from a flying saucer (in a thinly disguised ‘homage’ to The Thing). This crash lands in the museum, spilling an alien goo that melts the ice and brings the mammoth back as monster that sucks the life out of its victims by using its trunk. Yes, really.

  It brings the place to the attention of the sheriff – “This is my museum,” says Abernathy. “This is my town,” replies the bearded man wearing sunglasses. Ultimately, though, they both have to answer to Special Agents Powers (Leila Arcieri from xXx) and Whitaker from the NRO, whose jurisdiction is simply ‘The Earth’. They only have 17 hours to take out the threat before their superiors order the entire area to be nuked. Now Abernathy has to try and juggle his work with his home life, and make up for the fact that he’s forgotten daughter Jack’s (Serenity’s Summer Glau) birthday. “You’re never around,” chides Frank’s father (Skerrit from Alien), “you’re always sticking your head up some elephant’s ass!” All the threads come together though, when Jack sneaks off with her boyfriend to a teenage party in the woods that the mammoth gatecrashes, and it’s revealed that this isn’t the first time aliens have made contact with the town… Everything’s gearing up for a finale where they have to try and re-freeze the animal before they all run out of time.

  One of the characters in Mammoth mentions that this is all very much like The Blob, or even Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but you’ll no doubt be able to spot influences from many other movies. Powers and Whitaker look and act like they’ve wandered into the film from Men in Black, complete with hand-held scanning equipment and futuristic pistols. The guard getting offed in the museum is out and out The Relic, while the investigation into the alien invasion smacks very much of Evolution. Even a pretty original sequence where an alien-possessed frozen hand is brought to life in a microwave only to tap out the message, “We will kill you all,” relies heavily on a mixture of riffs from Re-Animator and Evil Dead II.

  A film with a plot as ludicrous as this one has to plant its tongue firmly in its cheek to survive, and to its credit this is where one of Mammoth’s strengths lies. From the groovy meteorite credits, which show a cave painting of stick men chasing and capturing a mammoth, to the epilogue itself, you will certainly find yourself giggling. Some of it won’t be intentional, of course…But the cast don’t exactly help, with Skerrit and Glau sleepwalking through their parts (the former even admits in an extras featurette that when people ask him about his character, he tells them, “I don’t know…”). Arcieri is there to pout and fill out her blouse in an able Angelina Jolie way, while only Ventresca seems to ‘get it’, hamming it up in true Bruce Campbell style.

  Ironically, Mammoth’s major failing is the title creature itself: a badly rendered CGI brute that only barely looks credible in the shadows, let alone in the daylight. You see loads of these kinds of movies on Sky and The Sci-Fi Channel with titles like Huge Snake! and Run from the Giant Ants; low budget movies that have taken advantage of the cut-price CGI packages that you can use on your home computers. Sadly, this looks just like those in places. Jokingly, Ventresca comments that director Tom Cox was only paid $150 for his services, and you seriously wish that some of his pay-packet had gone on the mammoth. Or, better yet, that the ‘big name’ headliners had been ditched in favour of ploughing money into a decent and, more importantly, scary monster. Little wonder that there are large chunks where the mammoth doesn’t even appear at all.

  Mammoth is a film that had so much potential, but fell foul of the Hollywood appetite for half-baked genre material. It’s a shame, because there is some real creative talent on display. Final verdict: not so much mammoth as mammiss.

  Blaze

  By Stephen King – A Richard Bachman book

  Hodder & Stoughton, £16.99

  Between 1977 and 1984 author Richard Bachman published five novels before his sudden and unexpected death in 1985 of cancer of the pseudonym. Dicky (as he was known to his friends) was never a major player in the world of literature, he never made the best-sellers list (his final novel Thinner sold around 28,000 copies) but during his brief seven year career he managed to build up a sturdy and somewhat faithful cult following, before being ‘outed’ as best-selling novelist Stephen King by a Washington book clerk and writer, Steve Brown. Rather tellingly after that Thinner went on to sell over 280,000 copies! Who said you should never judge a book by it’s cover… or author?!

  Written in late 1972 – early 1973 during his ‘Bachman’ writing era King soon lost confidence in the novel Blaze, considering it to be “crap” and, although it was briefly considered as a follow up to his debut novel Carrie (it would lose out to the vampire infested book Second Coming, soon to be re-titled as ‘Salem’s Lot’) he abandoned it without showing it to a single publisher. Instead it languished for thirty-four years as an infamous ‘trunk’ novel, packed away in a cardboard box, pushed into the corner of a cupboard before being dusted off in 2006, extensively revised and rewritten and released as Bachman’s (until now undiscovered) seventh, and final, novel.

  Blaze, like Bachman’s 1981 novel Roadwork, is an attempt at what King himself calls a “serious novel”; all supernatural, horror or Sci-Fi elements ejected in favour of gritty realism and bare-bones story-telling. Clayton (Blaze) Blaisdell Jr, thrown down the stairs by an abusive alcoholic father when he was only six years old, stumbles through life as a semi-retarded giant, friendless save for the weasely, manipulative con-artist George Rackley. As the novel opens George is dead and the clueless Blaze finds himself alone once again; frightened and confused, yet resolutely determined to put George’s final plan into action – kidnapping a baby and ransoming it back to it’s rich parents for a million dollars. Things start to get a bit complicated however when Blaze finds himself unexpectedly falling in love with the little ankle-snapper and gradually becomes reluctant about giving him back.

  There is no doubting that this is classic King at his yarn-spinning best. Following hot on the heels of the wonderfully apocalyptic Cell and the poignantly touching Lisey’s Story, Blaze is a ruthless and unflinching study of child abuse, mental cruelty and social ignorance in small town America. Original conceived as a follow up to his novel The Colorado Kid for Hard Case Crime publishers its flat, disconnected tones brilliantly hark back to the pulpy noir fiction of the 1950s creating a stark, unrelenting tale of pain, rejection and, ultimately, crime. Rewritten by King at a furious pace the narrative rattles along at breakneck speed hardly giving the reader time to catch their collective breaths, and although it lacks some of the warmth and familiarity often associated with the author’s longer novels (at a mere 291 pages little time is given for any real in depth character development) Blaze still fails to disappoint and contains everything we’ve come to expect and love from a Stephen King novel. It’s just a pity that we’ve had to wait thirty-four years for this little gem to finally hit our local book shops!

  Interestingly, all proceeds from Blaze go to The Haven Foundation, an organization specially created to help down on their luck freelance writers, so if you buy this book not only will you be getting a thumping good read but you’ll also be doing your bit for the odd struggling artiste! Now, doesn’t that give you a lovely warm glow inside!

  Coming Next Week: Fiction: New Skin for the Old Ceremony by David Tallerman

  If you have enjoyed this week’s issue, please consider throwing some of your hard-earned sheckles at us. We pay our writers, and your support is appreciated.