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  My Peculiar Family

  My Peculiar Family © 2016 by Sci Fi Saturday Night and Belanger Books, LLC

  Print and Digital Edition © 2016 by Belanger Books, LLC

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN-13: 978-1535498753

  ISBN-10: 1535498757

  For information contact Belanger Books, LLC

  61 Theresa Ct.

  Manchester, NH 03103

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  Book and Cover design by Brian Belanger

  “Schopenhauer said ‘We buy books because we believe we’re buying the time to read them.’ Isn’t that grand?”

  --Warren Zevon

  My Peculiar Family

  Table of Contents

  Introduction by Les Rosenthal (a.k.a The Dome)

  Welcome to the Uncanny Valley by Tracy Hickman

  The Geneology of Chastity Willingham Dinsdale by Christopher Golden and James A. Moore

  Miss Elizabeth’s Poison by Stacey Longo

  The Space Between by John Palisano

  Law and Mother by Jay Mooers

  Know All Men By These Present by Bracken MacLeod

  Pieces of Rosalee by Derrick Belanger

  Eggsettential Circumstances by Karen Gosselin

  Tuckahoe Marble by F. Allen Farnham

  Just Words by David Schechter

  The Luck of Walter Dimsdale by William Melkle

  With This Ring, I Thee Bind by Kristi McDowell

  Crowninshield’s Apothecary by Rob Watts

  Solomon’s Mirror by Robert Mayette

  Joshua by George O’Connor

  Jessamine by Samantha Boyette

  Agatha by Scott Thomas

  My Peculiar Kickstarter Family

  About the Authors

  INTRODUCTION

  I Hate When People Tell Me Things Happen For A Reason. What can be found in the attic of your home? Do you know? Do you remember all those boxes, the ones you and others filled and filed away, the ones from your parents, their parents, their relatives? The New England landscape that I grew up in is littered with ancestral multi-generational homes that have remained in families for generations, or having been purchased for rehab, only then finding the hidden treasures of the past of families unknown. The genesis of this anthology began in my wife’s family home a number of years back. I was in the attic with her looking for something, god knows what it might have been, when I saw a box in one of the rooms…filled with old photos and tintypes. When I asked who these were pictures of, nobody in her family had the slightest idea. For some reason, that nagged at me for a long time. In time, a theme began to coalesce and as I broached it to some of the writers on Sci Fi Saturday Night, it seemed to strike the same chord in them that it had with me.

  This book has been stopped and started at least 3 times. It has reshaped itself into what you see here. I have never believed that “things happen for a reason” but this process has proven the adage to me. Each moment of chaos and adversity had given over to amazing progress and new innovations.

  I need to thank each and every writer who has been on Sci Fi Saturday Night and has taken the time to contribute to this anthology to help keep Sci Fi Saturday Night up and running.

  I want to thank the SFSN staff, past and present for all their hard work in making and maintaining a quality website and podcast.

  I want to take a moment to specifically thank:

  My wife, Laurel, for her unwavering love and support. You have always been my biggest ally.

  Kriana, who decided that when a Mega-Communications Company cancelled the radio show, that the InterTubes was the place for us to be. She knows her stuff!

  Zombrarian, who very quietly offered assistance and help wherever she could.

  Dru, who always maintained that I could do anything, as long as I took her advice.

  Ron Garner for his friendship and mentoring us through this process.

  Spider Robinson, who is indirectly responsible for me even attempting to do this project and he doesn’t even know it.

  Sara Richard and Peter Vinton Jr. who have so much class, I am so honored to call these amazingly talented artists my friend.

  Illustrator X and The Dead Redhead, though you are no longer part of the weekly show you both had such an amazing impact on it during your tenures.

  Mr. K, my best friend, who, a long time ago, said, ‘Hey Domie, wanna do a radio show?’.

  To the unnamed people in the tintypes, thank you for your inspiration, both to me and to the individual authors.

  Finally, to you, the reader, I can’t thank you enough for sharing in this somewhat twisted vision of mine, the story of My Peculiar Family.

  Dome

  WELCOME TO THE UNCANNY VALLEY

  As the Director of Story Development at THE VOID, I live at the edges of the Uncanny Valley and occasionally stare down into its abyss.

  Where is this Uncanny Valley, you ask? Right here in your hands.

  Did you ever wonder why old photography tintypes and Daguerrotypes can sometimes make your skin shiver?

  For the science side, Robotics professor Masahiro Mori first forwarded the concept in 1970, the translation of the term into English having to wait eight years to appear in Jasia Reichardt’s Robot: Fact, Fiction and Prediction. ‘Uncanny’ in this sense, refers to the psychological concept of the word: something that is strangely familiar rather than just mysterious. Because uncanny is familiar, yet incongruous, it has been seen as creating cognitive dissonance within the experiencing subject, due to the paradoxical nature of being simultaneously attracted to and yet repulsed by an object. This, in turn, leads to an outright rejection of the object since rejection is easier than rationalization.

  It all boils down to this: when we observe a human likeness – whether the medium is cave drawings, paintings, sculpture, photographs, robotics or digital graphics in VR – you would think that the more realistic the portrayal of the human form, the more positive you would feel toward it. For the most part, that’s true. We feel more positively drawn toward the Simpsons than stick figures, more positive still toward Disney’s Snow White than the Simpsons and even more positively toward Pixar’s ‘Incredibles’ than Snow White.

  But there’s a dark, unexpected valley up ahead cutting across this upward slope. You start to drop over the precipitous edge with the movie ‘Polar Express’ which tries for more life-like animated characters but makes a lot of people shiver. Human corpses certainly look more like people than an impressionist painting but they are deeply uncomfortable to view. The depth of the valley is greatly exaggerated by movement. Still pictures of dead people are unsettling but add movement – say, zombies – and that can really be revolting.

  On the other side of the valley is the Promised Land which rising sharply to the summit of healthy, happy humans rendered in perfect fidelity. We can only hope to get there someday.

  But sometimes it is interesting to dwell i
n the depths of the valley, examine that internal dissonance and confront our dread of those things that are almost like us and yet the shadow of our more malevolent selves.

  Every family tree has roots that explore dark places. Chyna Dale is about to embark on a journey with roots deep in the uncanny valley. Sci-Fi Saturday Night has gathered together a few of their favorite guests to sit down at the table with Chyna and help her discover the stranger paths that are the foundation of her existence.

  And the uncanny valley we all must face.

  TRACY HICKMAN

  July, 2016

  THE GENEOLOGY OF CHASTITY WILLINGHAM DINSDALE

  Christopher Golden and James A. Moore

  If you wait long enough, the past will come back to haunt you. That was the sole thought going through my head as I listened to the lawyer on the other end of the static-filled phone line.

  On a rare stormy night in Tucson, Arizona, I had met a stranger who came to change my life in ways I could never have anticipated. He had brought with him a certified letter addressed to my old name. It was a wonder they ever found me. It had been over a decade since I’d heard from any member of my family. No Christmas cards, no birthday wishes, not a shred of news about their welfare and certainly no inquiries as to mine.

  I was content with that. We had never been close.

  Occasionally, for amusement’s sake, I’d tell someone my real name. Chastity Willingham Dimsdale. I had endured a fair number of mocking nicknames while growing up and legally changed my name when I was eighteen. These days I’m Chyna Dale. No middle name.

  I had phoned the lawyer at my earliest convenience, as instructed in the certified letter that had been delivered to my condominium address. I had to consider the expense carefully. Long distance calls were costly and I had a budget to keep in mind.

  My condo—half a duplex that had been recently restored—was small, but big enough for me. In another twenty years, it would be mine. But now the lawyer on the phone was telling me that the place I’d been working to own for a decade was more like a consolation prize. The house where I grew up, the house I had run away from a dozen times before I was legally allowed to escape it, was all mine just as soon as I signed a few papers.

  We had never been a loving family. You have to understand that. My father was far too obsessed with the work of making money to have time for his only living child, and my mother…well, my mother never quite got over the loss of my older brother. I never knew him, of course—he was dead before I was born—but Mother and I visited his grave regularly through my growing years and she often told me of everything she’d wanted for her only son. Somehow she never seemed to want much for me. I think I was a bit of a disappointment.

  And yet my mother had left everything to me.

  I would have never known and likely never have cared, but the lawyer found me despite the name change and my relocating halfway across the country. My mother and father were proud New Englanders. I had moved to Tucson to get away from the wretched cold that came from both them and the winters alike.

  So it was hardly a surprise that my mother had been dead nearly a year and no one in my family had bothered to contact me with the news. My cousin Stephen would have been the most likely to make the effort, but even he had always been deeply self-involved. Once he learned of my inheritance, it would have been typical of him to do everything in his power to track me down in hopes of wheedling some of that money out of me. His lavish lifestyle had always exceeded his means and he had often relied on others to rescue him from his excesses.

  The letter from the attorney was short and to the point beneath a header for the law firm of Clark, Clark, and Weisenberger. I spoke to Jake Weisenberger, who had apparently drawn the short straw and thus was forced to deal with me. If I could enough of what he said to quote it verbatim I’d write it down here, but when I spoke to him my ears were ringing and I had trouble catching a breath. As I had never expected to inherit anything from my family but my skin complexion I was very surprised to hear that my fortunes had just changed dramatically.

  I had never wanted their money. I had walked away from it for a reason, after all. I had my principles. But life doesn’t much care about the principles you decide to live by. The company I’d been working for since leaving Boston had gone belly up three months before that letter came to my door. Since then I had been living on my savings and they were dwindling fast, forcing me to see the possible inheritance with gratitude as well as regret and a bitterness I wish I could have ignored.

  The family I had left behind had found a way to make me come back home. I guess you could even call that revenge for having left them alone in the first place. I know it felt that way to me.

  ***

  It blurs more than many people might expect. I sat in a first class cabin on train from Tucson to Boston. I tried to read a book and failed. Tried to watch the landscape through the window and failed again. Restlessness ate away at my resolve and memories came back to whisper bitter sentiments. Eventually I fell into a fitful sleep filled with wretched memories of my father and my mother and their endless admonishments. A decade and a half since the last time my mother had looked at me and told me I should be “more like your brother,” and the words still hurt.

  Did I mention that my brother was stillborn? Can you understand why the words cut so deeply?

  I awoke as the train juddered to a stop in my hometown. My skin was covered in a fine mist of sweat with a whimper caught against my clenched teeth. I did not want to return to my family home. I did not want to see my father’s grave or my mother’s but I knew I would find them and I would stand in front of them, if only to make certain that my parents were well and truly gone from my life.

  Sometimes it’s hard to see a blessing until you can touch it. I didn’t want to see their graves. It was a physical need.

  The lawyer was good; I’ll give him that. I was fully intending to hail a cab when I saw the man holding a placard with my old name on it. It took me a full ten seconds of staring at the last name “Dimsdale” before I realized he was waiting for me.

  The chauffer was a tall man, almost a foot taller than I…and I am not short. He was polite and walked with me to a Bentley Mark VI. The back seat of the car was bigger than my bed at home. I knew it was supposed to feel luxurious but all it did was make me feel small.

  When he realized I had nothing to say the driver slid into a comfortable silence and let me study the city passing by outside the windows. I had been gone long enough that my memories of it were like things vaguely recalled from a dream, and yet now I found my recollections returning as if this were the waking world after all, and Tucson had been the dream. It was not a welcome realization. Familiar as it suddenly seemed, Boston felt inhospitable, locked away behind glass hued with a patina of disappointment and lost opportunity.

  Somewhere beyond the windows my first love was probably thinking about his wife and family. We might have been together if my father hadn’t intervened. Or perhaps we would have gone our own ways, but there wouldn’t have been so damned much resentment on my part. He was my first love, he was the reason I never trusted anyone else to get that close to me again.

  I was studying the fine collection of liquors in the well-stocked wet bar inside the limousine when we pulled to the curb outside of an office building that towered above almost everything around me. Ten minutes later I was sitting down in front of Jake Wiesenberger. He had a friendly face framed by short, dark, curly hair, and a voice designed to make women melt. He made me feel at home and told me the facts.

  There was no letter from my mother or my father. As my father had died some six years earlier I would not have expected one from him, but I would have thought my mother would have something to say.

  She let her actions speak louder than her words.

  I got everything. There were, of course, a few provisos. Upon hearing them I understood why Cousin Stephen had not reached out. If I failed to arrive within two years of her deat
h, the fortune would be distributed among the rest of the family. I was rather glad to inconvenience them, petty though that might sound.

  The other rule, the one that could not be broken, was that I had to live in the house where I was born for no less than seven years. I could go on vacations for no more than two weeks per year, or everything I stood to inherit would be forfeit.

  We all have our price, don’t we? It’s just a matter of how high.

  In death, my mother had found my price. All I had to do to never feel the dread of not being able to pay my bills again was live in my old family home.

  I signed a lot of papers and was given copies of almost everything I signed. It was an interesting study in instant gratification. Each time I signed, something else was presented to me. Signature one got me the keys and title to my mother’s car, a massive affair that almost rivaled the limo. Signature two earned me the keys to the house. After that it was keys to safe deposit boxes, letters that carefully explained where my money was and how much of it I was entitled to every year. I could not have it all, you see, because I might have taken the money and run. Instead I was granted a comfortable allowance for every month I spent in the house. Enough to be very comfortable. Not enough to run away.

  My mother was thorough in the breakdown of her slow destruction of my soul.

  ***

  I have run across a hundred references in books to how much smaller “home” seemed after someone went away. It is not a sentiment that I share.

  The old house was as large as ever, and sat bloated and brooding on the well-manicured lawn of the estate. The long, winding road that ended in a serpentine driveway designed to help hide the entire place behind a thick copse of trees. Coming home was like staring at the cover of a gothic romance. The only thing missing was me, running away in a flowing nightgown. I’d already done that. This was how that fairy tale ended.