Hub - Issue 15 Read online

  Hub

  Issue 15

  July 13th 2007

  Editors: Lee Harris and Alasdair Stuart.

  Published by The Right Hand.

  Sponsored by Orbit.

  Issue 15 Contents

  Fiction: A Brief History of Slip-Time by Mikal Trimm

  Reviews: Judge Dredd: Origins, Doctor Who: Valhalla, Doctor Who: The Wishing Beast & The Vanity Box, Sapphire and Steel: The Mystery of the Missing Hour

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  NEWS - British Fantasy Society Open Night in York – October 2007

  On Saturday October 13th, Hub is playing host to an Open Night for the British Fantasy Society. Held at York Brewery, the Open Night welcomes both members and non-members alike – if you’re interested in Fantasy or Horror, feel free to come along! We just need to know how many of you are coming so we can make appropriate arrangements with the brewery.

  As well as socialising with like-minded people, there is also the option to be part of a private tour of the brewery (a small charge will apply for this).

  Full details over at www.hub-mag.co.uk/bfs

  York’s a great place to visit. We hope to see you there!

  A Brief History of Slip-Time

  by Mikal Trimm

  Jack Dunny felt the sudden sweat and clammy-palmed anxiety that came with the time-shift, and he jumped to his feet and into motion immediately. His surroundings blurred as he stood, the passers-by leaving snail trails of themselves behind them, until they resolved finally into statues. The wind ceased; birds hung in the air, frozen in defiance of gravity.

  Jack moved in an erratic-yet-effective pattern developed through years of practice. That lady, the one with the tiny designer handbag dangling casually from her well-manicured hands -- he loosened her stiff grip with a quick wrench, rifled through her purse, and found a twenty stuffed between her credit cards. That man, wearing a designer jogging outfit even though he plainly never sweated on purpose -- Jack popped the back of the man’s right shoe down to find the expected clip of folded bills wedged into his sock. And so he went, from purse to pocket through the quiescent crowd, ignoring jewelry for the immediacy of folding cash.

  There was a time when, crow-like, he snatched at every shiny bauble. It only took one near-arrest when he tried to pawn a hot Rolex for him to give up that particular obsession. Now he focused on money. Hard, untraceable cash, nothing like it.

  A beautiful young thing waited to cross the street, model-quality -- hell, in this city she might even be a model -- and the old passions took over. He paused to cup a breast...

  ...and it was back to high-school. The first few times the talent displayed itself, Jack had panicked, sure that the world was ending, or at least his world. Everything slowed and stopped, and Jack would huddle on the ground, an ungainly fetus, waiting for the Judgment. Once he realized that time seemed to stop for everyone except himself during his ‘glory moments’, he gave full vent to his hormones. Taking advantage of the stillness, he charged into the girls’ locker room, ready to exploit the inevitable congruence of his uncontrollable ability and blessed fate.

  He found himself, zero-hour, in the girls' showers, surrounded by the discovered country of flesh. He pictured an orgy of bliss, a hand-picked feast of pleasure. He would be Jack-in-whoever’s-box he chose, and not one of these helpless meat-statues could stop him. He spent several minutes running from girl to girl, stroking nipples, groping crotches, before he realized that this wasn’t going to work. The girls remained in position, a fistful of Venuses, seemingly unmoved by his attentions. Jack was hard and ready, but they were just hard. Warm, yes, soft and smooth on the surface, but they didn’t yield. Beneath the silk of their skin, they were little more than statues, ready to pose, endlessly, under his fevered gaze.

  Stymied in his lust, he felt the nausea that he’d learned to associate with the end of his episodes, and he ran, not noticing the crystalline mist from the showers as it bounced from his shoulders like tiny diamonds, not noticing the girl he shoved on his way out as she tilted slowly and began an arrested fall...

  ...and now he pulled his hand quickly away from the soft marble of this untouchable mannequin and ran, stuffing money underneath his tattered clothing, managing to get to his comfortable spot at his favorite street corner before the stomach cramps set in. He didn’t notice the stray bills falling behind him in slow-motion as the world woke up; he collapsed into his corner, shoving dollars and twenties and the occasional fifty beneath his thrift-store clothes, letting them mingle with the mossy remnants of other sweat-soaked, grimy fragments of legal tender that coated and stained his body.

  And as the world snapped back into place around him, he settled again into his nest of newspapers and deli-wrap. He didn’t even notice when he began shouting his mantra to the people that walked past him, unseeing:

  “My time. Not your time. My time! My own time! I own time!”

  #

  The second hand of the ancient clock in the office slowed, stopped.

  Lydia Singleton felt time halt; she spat reflexively, clearing her throat of the bitter taste that foreshadowed her reign.

  She stood slowly, regally, looking down on her captured co-workers with disdain. Flouncing her long skirts with an actor’s flourish, she got down to business.

  Jimmy. Next cubicle to hers, laughing-boy Jimmy. Always had a kicker for every comment, always a punch-line for every joke. She almost giggled at her good fortune. Jimmy held a cup of coffee half-way to his mouth, and she pursed her lips delicately as Jimmy’s favorite song echoed in her head: Lydia, oh Lydia, oh have you seen Lydia, Lydia the tattooed lady...

  She spat in his coffee. Then she wandered off to find her next victim.

  Darla. Oh, yes, the Whore of the Third Floor. Darla wore the tightest blouses allowed in the workplace, the shortest skirts allowed by Nature, and the sleaziest undergarments found in any mail-order catalogue. She bent over when kneeling would suffice and knelt whenever a man passed by at the right altitude. She also evidenced a seeming grasp of office politics, which made her more than a bimbo, as far as Lydia was concerned.

  It made Darla a problem.

  Lydia clutched her weapon. After all the years of blank-time, as she thought of it, she’d learned a thing or two. You can’t move anyone, not much. You can’t put anyone in compromising situations, even if you would love to have that much control, because they were too hard to budge, first, and more importantly, you never knew when time would come back.

  Instead, you could find a way to manipulate small things. Like, say, a letter-opener. Sharpened.

  Lydia walked up to Darla, silent Darla, immobile Darla, and, with the determination of a queen, popped the buttons of Darla’s blouse. Grunting with the effort of affecting the placid world around her, she sawed through the front strap of Darla’s bra.

  If you’ve got it, flaunt it, right, Darla? Lydia turned and walked away, dismissing Darla with a flip of her wrist.

  Ever mindful of her personal anti-clock, she moved on, saving her swee
test moment for last, as usual. She approached Him.

  Daniel. Preacher-boy, as she thought of him. Or Mr. All-Is-Well, or Mr. Happy-Family, or Mr. Meet-My-Savior, depending on her mood. Lydia loathed him. God was his security blanket, Christ his pacifier. Nothing fazed the man; he met every hardship, every downturn in life, with the same Pollyanna attitude, and it sickened her.

  God is watching us, my ass. Lydia smiled to herself as she ran a hand teasingly across his stiff shoulders. Is He watching this, I wonder, she thought as she pulled a hair from her head, checking to make sure it wasn’t one of the grey ones, and laid it carefully across the back of his coat. Or better yet, this? She bent down beside Daniel and managed to tug the collar of his tan shirt up a bit, leaving it exposed beyond the neck of his sports coat. Gently, she brushed the collar with her lips, leaving a subtle-yet-telling trace of lipstick. She then forced the collar back down below the neckline of his jacket. Forget God. You don’t have to explain anything to Him. Just explain it to your wife.

  Satisfied, Lydia returned to her desk. She felt the bitter taste of bile in the back of her throat as she sat, indicating that blank-time was over. For a moment, she swallowed reflexively, hot saliva assaulting her mouth as she fought to keep from vomiting. Then the second hand on the clock stirred, jerked, and came awake again.

  Lydia popped a breath mint and smiled to herself. She waited anxiously for Darla’s screams.

  #

  Jason Wesselman felt the coppery tang of adrenaline, and the world paused for him. He smiled, letting the buzz run through his body; then he went to work.

  This is where the fun starts.

  Adjusting his backpack, he examined his surroundings with an artist’s eye, inspecting the snapshot of life around him for hidden meaning. He thought of pulling out his sketchbook, decided to wait a while -- he had enough material at home for several illustrations. Right now he craved action. Sometimes he saw something immediately; other times he found himself searching in vain as his precious moments in slip-time ticked away.

  He thought of it as slip-time -- that period when he somehow managed to slip between two isolated moments in reality, as if life were a movie and he had inserted himself between two frames of the film. When it had happened to him the first time, years ago, he’d merely wandered aimlessly, caught up in the miraculous: a dog, frozen in mid-leap to catch a Frisbee, the disc itself halted in mid-spin; a fountain in the park that spewed perfect globes, each filled with a tiny version of the world around them; a squirrel caught hovering between two branches. Once he realized that the miracle planned on repeating itself on a regular basis, though, he started question things. Why is this happening to me?, and, more importantly, what am I supposed to do about this?

  Maybe he’d read too many comics as a kid, but the answers seemed obvious. I’ve been given a Power; I need to learn to use it.

  He felt foolish the first few times he tried, like a kid playing superhero -- he had an inane desire to tie a sheet around his neck. But he experimented with his ability, and he learned exactly how limited his self-appointed role of savior was.

  It was very hard to affect his surroundings in slip-time. Even inanimate objects were burdensome to control, and people were extremely tenacious; it took an enormous amount of energy to cause even the smallest effect on a person. He almost gave up on the idea completely, but his helplessness ate at him constantly, a puzzle demanding a solution.

  Eventually, he learned to think small. He couldn’t stop the purse-snatching, already in progress, that he noticed one day, but he could, with a clumsy-but-effective roundhouse kick, displace the thief’s planted foot a few inches. When time reasserted itself, the man tripped and fell full-force into the pavement; the purse flew from his hand with the impact. Jason watched from the sidelines, giddy, as the woman grabbed her purse and beat the man across the head and shoulders with it while onlookers laughed in delight.

  Now Jason viewed the world with a well-honed sense of perspective; the ability to see something out-of-place became almost instinctive. Today he was out taking a walk near his house, which was tucked into a quiet suburb with very little crime. Still, he felt the sense of discomfort he’d learned to trust when his eyes identified a problem that his brain had not yet recognized.

  It was a typical Sunday afternoon. Dogs chased cats, lawn mowers chased grasshoppers, and children chased --

  He saw it. Several children, five or six years old tops, playing with a ball in someone's front yard, the ball rolling toward the street, one girl racing desperately after it, a minivan about to cross its path. Jason couldn’t judge speed with everything in suspension, and he’d never been any great shakes at physics, anyway. Would the ball reach the street? Would the girl reach the ball? Would the van reach the girl?

  Jason didn’t really care. The possibility was there. Why take chances? He crossed the street and, with a forceful kick, adjusted the ball’s trajectory. When slip-time ended, the ball would give a little bounce, maybe, and roll back to the children and away from the street. No big deal. No one would even notice.

  And that was the part Jason liked the most.

  His early ideas about superheroes had been vanquished long ago. Now, he just did what he could. He caused no harm and hoped that he helped someone every now and then, but he didn’t even wait around to see the results anymore. It seemed egotistical.

  As he walked away, he thought of his grandmother. Whenever some near-catastrophe was narrowly averted, she’d say, “Well, looks like someone has a guardian angel around!” Jason liked that. He often wondered if there were others like him, others that could fall out of time and work a little magic on the world around them. Not superheroes, but guardian angels, maybe. Lots of them, all around, never noticed, but there, invisible. Persistent. Always looking out for others.

  After all, he thought as he relaxed into the comfortable tiredness he always felt when slip-time ended, what else would you do?

  2.

  Lydia hated looking for work. She roamed the city streets as if expecting someone to stop her, hug her to his breast, and scream, “Dear God! You’re just the employee I’ve been searching for!”

  In her worldview, at least, that’s the way it should happen.

  The crappy thing about all this, the thing that really just pissed her off about the whole matter, was that she didn’t even get fired this time. The Big Kahunas decided to close down shop on her whole branch office due to poor performance. Within six months of the time they’d hired her on, production dropped nearly fifty percent, and the use of sick leave doubled, while management seemed to lose all interest in controlling spiraling costs.

  She blamed it all on Daniel. After his wife left him he’d lost all business-sense, the weak bastard. Everyone else in the office took advantage of it, what with their ‘illness due to emotional stress’ or pathetic little outbreaks of paranoia. Hell, as far as she was concerned they all deserved to get the boot, the way they acted.

  But damn it, her performance was just fine, thank you very much. She just got lumped in with the losers. Again.

  And now, here she was, plodding through areas of the city she’d never deigned to visit before, looking for some damn office with an address that didn’t actually seem to exist. All because everyone else around her couldn’t do their jobs. Just thinking about it made her want to throw up.

  Then the cramps came, like her worst menstrual pains dialed up to a million, and the world came to a dead halt all around her except for some crazy bastard shouting something about stealing his time.

  #

  Jack knew he was sick. Dying, maybe.

  Well, it felt like it, anyway.

  Someone rolled him last night. Ten years now, living on the street, hell, owning the street and the city and the freaking world, baby! and some stupid time-dweller managed to find Jack’s safest nest and kick the holy crap out of him, taking his newest Goodwill coat and every President stuffed inside it.

  He frigging hurt. The cold winters never
bothered him, the hottest August afternoons didn’t faze him, but this. Damn it, somebody was going to suffer for this, kid you not, some little piss-ant could number his days starting now, brother, ‘cause ol' Jack had plenty of time to find that sorry asshole.

  He had all the time in the world.

  So he’d left his nice, comfortable corner this morning, just as soon as he could muster the strength to move and ignore the pain of his fractured ribs, and gone hunting.

  He couldn’t make much headway, at first. The constant pain wore him down, and he’d stop every ten minutes or so to hunch down in an alley and cough up thin tendrils of pink drool. Can’t be good, spitting blood like that, but hey, he doubted his health plan covered it, right?

  A little rest, a few breaths that didn’t bubble so much, and he’d move on, searching. He’d know who did it. Not a doubt in his mind. He’d smell it on the guy, sniff out the taint of his stolen money like a bloodhound.

  Moneyhound. Greenbackhound. Poundhound, but wrong country, or guineahound or markhound or damn he hurt and where the hell was he and why was he just standing here with his head against a wall feeling worse and worse and --

  Hellhounds, that’s what they were, ripping him apart from the inside out as the glory moment came on him, and he’d only thought he’d hurt before, this was killing him, not like being mugged last night, no way in Hell, this time the thief wanted something inside him, and he looked up and saw the woman and felt her doing it to him.

  “Forget it, bitch! You took my money, but no way you’re stealing my time!”

  He ignored all the pain, ignored the rich folk on the sidewalk frozen in their petty splendor, and leapt at the one woman still moving.

  He saw the expression on her face for a split second -- surprise, horror, then recognition, somehow -- before he grabbed her throat. Her hand darted into the side pocket of her purse, clutching something shiny and sharp, and drove it into his side as he touched her.