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  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author or Grey Matter Press except for brief quotations used for promotion or in reviews. This collection is a work of fiction. Any reference to historical events, real people or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imaginations, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  DEATH'S REALM

  ISBN 978-1-940658-34-6

  First Grey Matter Press Electronic Edition

  January 2015

  Anthology Copyright © Grey Matter Press

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  OMNISCOPIC

  Rhoads Brazos

  SOME OTHER DAY

  John F.D. Taff

  HAUNTER

  Hank Schwaeble

  BURIAL SUIT

  John C. Foster

  NINE

  Aaron Polson

  PENUMBRA

  Jay Caselberg

  FOXHOLE

  JG Faherty

  DROWNING

  Gregory L. Norris

  THE WEIGHT

  Jane Brooks

  HARDER YOU FALL

  Brian Fatah Steele

  MIRRORWORLD

  Martin Rose

  MARCH HAYS

  Matthew Pegg

  HIGH ART

  Karen Runge and Simon Dewar

  A PIRATE'S RANSOM

  Jay O'Shea

  TO TOUCH THE DEAD

  Paul Michael Anderson

  YOU ONLY DIE ONCE

  Stephen Graham Jones

  Declarations of Copyright

  More Dark Fiction from Grey Matter Press

  “Eternity can be measured.”

  It was exactly the kind of thing Boas would say after a few stout drinks, of which he'd tenaciously partaken. I should know, I had been graced with the bill. It was a lost wager, the nature upon which I'd rather not elaborate.

  “Infinites of scale?” I asked. “Cantor beat you to it.”

  “Honestly, Davis, that's so pedestrian.”

  We sat at an out of the way table at Schrödinger’s. It was crowded that night. With finals done, the university students were seeking inebriation and like company. The pub, with its bygone mise-en-scène of copper and rosewood, was the favored hangout for all physics graduates. They crammed themselves elbow to elbow at the ice-top bar and drank in boisterous clusters across the floor. Gas chandeliers cast down a warm light the color of straw. Atmosphere was important here, maintained at an antique yesterday.

  Boas took a long drink from a chrome flask, ellipsoidal with three finned feet—a Buzz Bomb, if I had heard his order correctly. He downed its contents with a flourish and motioned to a server. I held my tongue. Boas was likely to choose an expensive jeroboam if I protested.

  “Consider this,” he said, tipping his wiry frame over the table. He looked down his long beak of a nose and squinched his eyebrows down so low that I questioned whether he could even see. “Perception is immortal. As it seems to fade—”

  “Death? This again?”

  “There is no death. Perception seeps out of reality. This reality. This eternity.”

  “And is projected into another. Yes, yes. My god, Bowie, we've had this conversation so many times.”

  As intriguing as Boas's metaphysical jaunts could be, this particular path of inquiry had been tread into dust.

  “Ah,” Boas said, “and you only accept the imperial.”

  “Empirical. You've had far too much to drink.”

  “Agreed. But is evidence all that convinces you?”

  “What more is there?”

  “Theoretical proof.”

  “Theoretical,” I said.

  “Proof!” Boas slammed his fist to the table and grinned as he caught our neighbors' curiosity. There were mumbles about the former professor, and what he must have done to lose tenure, before the din rose once again.

  I dismissed him and breathed in deeply of the pub's heady atmosphere: alcohol, tobacco, perfume, old leather. There was a pleasant thickness to it that swaddled one's senses. It anchored you, compelled you to stay.

  Boas snapped his fingers, inches away from my nose. “I have something you simply must see.”

  “Is it another of your theorems?” I asked. I tried to sound incurious, but was not in the slightest. Any new creation of Boas's was bound to shake the heavens.

  “It will astound you.”

  “Try me. Right here.”

  “I cannot simply recite it.” He motioned with his thumb, clicking up and down.

  I felt at my chest pocket and produced a pen. Boas grabbed it and studied it closely.

  “Well?” I said.

  He opened a napkin as if it was folded vellum, spread it before himself, and fell to it. He threw down page two, three, and on and on. I watched in silence.

  Boas harbored many faults—arrogance, narcissism, and contrariness chief among them—but his mathematical abilities were second to none. Watching him establish a proof was like watching Mozart casually sketch a quartet—no corrections and no hesitations, just a steady script that flowed like oil. The end was reached with a double barline, fine and QED.

  I pinched the work between trembling fingers, sickened, and at the same instant, elated at its divine clarity. Boas had outdone himself. Over drinks, he had crafted an intricacy that humiliated my efforts on last year's dissertation. I stood in Salieri's shoes.

  “Goodnight! Bowie, are you serious?”

  “Always.” With a wink to the waitress, he accepted a new drink and raised it to his lips.

  “If this is true—”

  Boas only tasted the rim before lowering it. “What are you implying, if?”

  “Well, this establishes a theory, but you still must—”

  “Ah, your observable proof.” He sipped thoughtfully. “I have.”

  “You have?”

  “I've built it. I call it an omniscope.”

  What awaits us after death? Nothing, claimed academia. Boas thought otherwise. His peers dismissed the question because they feared the answer. Their timid natures denied his own pluck and prodigy. His vindication—their humiliation—would ignite a global revival with Boas himself spitting fire from the pulpit.

  All according to Boas, it goes without saying.

  “So,” I said. I tried to hide my nervousness. “Another universe.”

  “To measure an eternity, we must first observe it.”

  “And you can…see it?”

  “See? That is…sensually inaccurate. Detect might be a better term. To see through the curtain would require a projection of one plane onto another, which for obvious reasons we can't—well, shouldn't—do.”

  “An intersection,” I said. “A single point.”

  Boas chuckled.

  “And then you can measure… Wait! How big is the aperture between planes?”

  “A Planck length.”

  I laughed. “My dear Boas, I hate to be the har
binger of bad news, but it cannot be done. If you charged a photon with enough energy to measure such a small distance, it would buckle and implode.”

  “Yes. You know, it really sounds like you want to help.”

  “You call it an omniscope?”

  Boas didn't answer. He stood, albeit with a loose tipsiness, and gathered his jacket. I settled the tab and followed.

  * * *

  We traveled across town to Boas's lab—machinery, terminals and half-finished projects spread over a warehouse floor. It was as if a clockwork Leviathan had been flayed across the grounds, wiring and mechanisms sliced from its bones. In the middle of the clutter was a large tent, the kind a person staked down at the fairgrounds and filled with turquoise jewelry and feathered trinkets.

  “It's in there,” he said.

  We entered.

  I shouldn't hasten to describe too much of the construction. Only Boas truly understood it. Even with my education, only the surface concepts were within my grasp. In essence, Boas had an inverted quantum funnel and was shunting space itself away from a single point. At the same instant, he was burrowing into that point with a focused beam of…I wasn't sure.

  “Well?” Boas operated a series of controls on a wide cylindrical tank. It hummed. Something inside of it was spinning.

  “A graphene supercapacitor?” My heart sank. I must admit, it was an honor to be shown this arguably historic invention, but my own place in this world was starting to look very small.

  “Yes.” He smirked. “Attached to the world's most delicate coilgun. Despite its exactitude, it requires an immense jolt to truly sing.”

  The omniscope was a long, metallic spiral mounted on thick legs. A glass barrel housed its lithium coil. A mass of electrical components sat at the opposite end and connected to the supercapacitor.

  “The integument is filled with xenon gas,” Boas said. He buffed the coil's glass barrel with his sleeve. “To prevent oxidization of the lithium, naturally. With all the heat, it would otherwise create a quite nasty peroxide.” He tapped at the supercapacitor's dials. “And we don't want that.”

  I could taste it in the air. That much power had a flavor, a little like blood, I suppose. My skin itched horribly.

  “But how does it—”

  “Simple.” Boas threw a lever on the capacitor and its frame began to pulse. The mechanism within must have been spinning at a prodigious rate. “Charge comes through here. Lithium magnetizes.”

  “Lithium can't—”

  “Don't interrupt. It's paramagnetic. It will carry enough for my purposes. I can't have the charge retained or it won't thrum.”

  “Thrum?”

  “Waves of magnetization in the coil cause a resonance in surrounding matter. The effect is quite sublime. You'll see—or rather, hear—very soon. The charge arcs in and compresses to a stream. The lower apparatus syncs everything. It hits this point and then these sensors record it. And we watch it here.” He pointed to a dark screen. “Wear this please.” He tossed a mask to me.

  “For what?”

  “Let's just call it residue. I'm unsure, but it may be carcinogenic.”

  I started to argue, but Boas put on his own mask and gestured with his fingers. One. Two. Thr—

  I slapped my mask in place as he hit the power.

  The omniscope jumped to life with a crack like thunder. I staggered back, not stopping until I hit the tent wall. A bluish-green haze haloed the lithium coil. The lower machinery screamed and shook. Boas pulled another switch and I felt it.

  “My god,” I slipped to my knees.

  “I think it may be just that,” Boas said through his mask. “This is the frequency of our eternity.”

  I felt hollow, as if I were skin stretched over chimes of bone. With each pulse from the omniscope my own body answered in kind. It was the thrum Boas had spoken of. Everything answered with a sort of music. The floor, the tent, the air itself. It was a melody, a faultless song.

  Boas shouted over the strains. “The neighbors are complaining, as you can imagine.” He pulled me up with a proffered hand. “The effect is far-reaching, so we must turn it off soon. They don't have proof that it's my doing, but I must be a suspicious character.”

  There was a pop and the vibration ceased. The music faded. Boas could once again speak without shouting.

  “No, don't remove it.” He reached up to my mask. “Look.”

  The screen showed a multi-colored mesh spider webbed out of a central point. An oddly-spaced pattern within the web glowed.

  “Start from zero and go clockwise.”

  “What?”

  “Like a polar graph, but clockwise.”

  I did so and noticed the pattern. “The brighter webs are primes?”

  “Exactly! We are at 2 and 191. That's our melody. Then, 439, 709, 1,009 and so on. Our parallel universes, I believe. The set of primes indexed at modulo 42. Isn't that amusing?”

  I didn't know what to say.

  “What interests me though,” Boas touched the screen, “is our neighbor at 3. Now, I'm going to see if anyone's home, maybe borrow a cup of sugar. Watch the core.”

  A black thread flowed through the omniscope's coil. It hung in the air, spinning out of nothingness in a hair-fine corkscrew. At the tip of the coil it disappeared.

  “What is that?” I whispered.

  Boas laughed. “Do you feel it?”

  I did. The air was humid, sticky. Everything was shining. How was it getting out of that sealed glass barrel?

  “Bowie, what the hell is it?”

  “Guess.”

  “Quit being so damned impudent.”

  “No, really. I want your professional assessment.”

  I peered at the coil, still glowing with a faint aura. That hair, coming from nowhere and going to nowhere. No, that wasn't right at all. It was being spun from the world. If what Boas said was true—

  “The thread is dense matter,” I said.

  “Now there's an understatement. It's our thread, from the web, as you say. Matter, gravity, time. At a level where they're closely related.”

  “Bowie, you are insane!”

  “Yes! But, no. You do understand.”

  It was a string wheedled out of that battery's current. Micro black holes. I shouldn't even be able to see such a thing. They should collapse instantly. I argued the point.

  Boas answered. “Another grows in the femtosecond in which its neighbor dies.”

  “But at that interval, the gravity wave would travel a micron. That would be enough to—”

  “Don't agonize over it. We're absolutely safe, relatively, more or less.”

  The air sparkled with mist. Whatever the substance was that was flattening my hair, dripping down my cheeks, it was forming from the point of the corkscrew and spraying outward, straight through the glass. I held up my hand. Straight through me. Most of the mist caught on the surface, but some drifted through.

  My clothes and mask were soaked with it. I could even taste it, popping like static on my tongue. I knew what it was, because it couldn't be forgotten. It had been so long—a lifetime, plus a little.

  “Archimedes asked for a suitably long lever,” Boas said, “but I'll settle for a sharp enough edge.” He rubbed his fingers together in the air. He wanted me to name it. “Give up?”

  I couldn't bring myself to say it. “I…I don't—”

  “It's a coagulant.”

  I felt queasy. “Please turn it off.”

  “Do you know what that implies?”

  “Turn it off.”

  He scoffed and flipped the power. The aura faded. That dark thread, the most destructive force man has ever created, faded to gray and wisped away, appropriately, like a spider web.

  “Come,” Boas said. “I'm famished. We'll get something to eat.”

  * * *

  Boas gave me a change a clothes, for which I was grateful. I discarded my own, unwilling to even contemplate donning them again. We caught a taxi to an all-night diner—one
of those establishments that sells nothing but breakfast—and sat at a corner booth. There were a few other fellows here: mailmen, truckers, possibly a drug dealer. I wasn't sure, but he did keep eyeing us with malice.

  “The universe is alive,” Boas said. “It is cellular, in a membrane of time.”

  I shook my head and chewed down a slice of bacon.

  “Think of it,” he continued. “The boundaries aren't physical. They exist at all points as a quantum skin.”

  “It was trying to heal itself?”

  “Yes, with platelets, primordial ooze, manna. It has many names.”

  I couldn't even grasp where he was going with this.

  “So now what?” I asked.

  “I need your help.”

  “What could you possibly need from me?” I asked. “Bowie, the things you have in there are… Why don't you patent them, sell them, something?”

  “Money?” Bowie rolled his eyes. “How trite. Finances do not concern me. This is so much more important.” He fixed his gaze on me. “I'm going to make contact.”

  “Contact? With what?”

  “I probably should have asked you first.” He scratched at his neck and shrugged. “I'm sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “Look. There are…how should I put this?” Boas picked up his fork and chased a link around his plate. He speared it. “Side effects.”

  If I hadn't been sitting, I would have fallen over.

  “Not lethal. Well, um…”

  “Bowie, what did you—”

  “Stay calm. It's not like you're thinking. You are quite safe.”

  I shoved my plate away and squeezed the edge of the table.

  “Relax,” he said. “Look around the room. What do you see?”

  I couldn't take my eyes off him. He'd exposed me to something, knowing that there were dangers.

  “It was that…that mist.”

  “Ylem is the archaic term for it, but ectoplasm is more accurate, mirroring the cellular aspect as well as the metaphysical. Now, look around the room. How many others are here?”

  What an inane question. I made a cursory appraisal. “Seven.”

  “I count eight, but I've had more exposures.”

  We made a quick comparison, marking off each person in turn, verifying what the other saw. We both saw the truckers, the deliveryman, the security guard and others.