Jigsaw World

1 Dark Storms

Tom stared out of the window at the approaching storm. He was lucky to have found this shelter, even if he was currently sharing it with four other refugees from the weather. The clouds were weaving strange patterns in the sky as they sought their prey along the highway.

As the clouds roiled above, one could see faces in the shapes above, some almost human, others, not so much. Nobody that Tom had ever talked to could explain the apparent intelligence and predatory nature of storms these days. On the other hand, everyone who could see knew that being caught out in the storm was certain death.

The storm was focusing in on a delivery truck, which was traveling at high speed down the nearby highway, moving directly toward this stone house from which Tom was watching. The clouds twisted above the truck like tentacles or worms, the strong gusting wind was rocking the vehicle from side to side in its headlong flight, and the lightning strikes were getting closer and closer to their target.

Tendrils of the dark clouds and the vehicle converged less than a thousand feet from the door of the shelter. The lightning that the cloud generated was released in a second upon contact with the truck; a glaring arc like the world’s biggest arc welder lit the rapidly darkening world. The truck seemed not so much to blow up as to vaporize.

Tom turned away from the window as the cloud tendrils were being reabsorbed back into the parent clouds, and the clouds began to drift lazily about in the sky in a lazy interlude before finding their next target. The pretty little blonde teenager named Nancy was huddled in the far corner of the room with her mother, Susan, and the bald and portly Gilbert Taylor sat nonchalantly on the couch drinking the hooch of whoever owned this house. The serious expression on Bailey’s face put the lie to the idea that dogs, at least collie-shepherd mixes, were incapable of higher thought and the resultant concerns that higher thought brings.

Tom had been traveling about the countryside in the last few months, a very unusual habit in these troubling times, but Tom was an unusual man, and quite possibly troubled, to boot. Most people stuck close to home these days, ready to bolt for safety at the first sign of trouble. Everyone had a knot in their stomachs about the future, even though most did not know why.

Not that Tom was in any way a peculiar man. While it was true that he seemed to have a nose for when one of these activities was going to happen, this was in no way a unique ability. Somewhere between one in ten and one in twenty of the people he had met had this ability to some degree. What made him a bit unusual was that he depended on it. The others always seemed to distrust their nose and stayed in ‘safe’ areas most of the time. The other people in this house must have been caught short of safety. Lord knows why Bailey was here.

Tom could feel that the danger was over for the moment. When the events were about to happen, he could feel that the world was thinner, as though it were a painting by an unknown artist-god, and the time and place where the event was about to happen was where the brush had laid down a thinner coat of paint. Sometimes, when the temperature was in that niche between cold and hot and was 72 degrees in an almost warm spring day, it would suddenly begin to feel chilly like the 72 degrees in an almost cold autumn day.

He continued through the living room where the others huddled and searched the kitchen until he found a decent bottle of single malt scotch whiskey. Feeling slightly cheered by the discovery, he returned to the living room with the bottle and some glasses, Bailey trotting by his side. It was not too hard to convince Susan to partake of the hooch, and oddly enough, she didn’t object when Tom poured a shot of whiskey for Nancy.

Ten minutes found a Susan that looked much more relaxed, and Nancy was showing a bit of redness in her complexion, and an animated but slightly unfocused activity. Gilbert was well ahead of all of them on the road to inebriation, having started first and never stopped. In these strange days, this sort of communal reaction to the events was par for the course.

So, do you two live in Paradise Valley? Tom asked. "I have never understood that name, it is definitely not Paradise, and it doesn’t seem to be a valley, except by comparison to Camelback Mountain."

Yeah, we live off Tatum, Nancy said. We had car trouble, and then we saw this house just before the clouds came in. It is alright here, I guess. It is probably someone’s idea of Paradise, compared to downtown Phoenix, anyway.

I guess. You are lucky to have made it here. Well stocked, safe, and undefended. We all better lay low here until daylight, Tom replied. It doesn’t feel like things are totally over out there.

Nancy had started doing all of those strange woman signs that girls seem to pick up by the time they are two, handling their hair, that oddly feminine eye dance and small smile quirks, and that upward escalation to the vocal registry. The fact that she was of that physical sort where one couldn’t be sure if she were thirteen or seventeen didn’t exactly square with the promise of that scared little smile she was putting out there.

Tom would have expected her mother to have been the one to come on to him, but there she was, delivering a thousand mile stare into the little shot of whiskey she was nursing. Oh, well, the world was a little more accommodating in these areas than it used to be, but Tom didn’t intend on letting this little pubescent drama go any further. Fortunately, all he had to do to stop it was nothing.

This little gang of desperados was a bit special, in that they could see what was happening around them. Even Bailey was unique that way, even though animals did seem to sense these events a bit more than humans did. Humanity-at-large would attribute the results of falling prey to the storm by the deliveryman as simply a bad traffic accident, for some reason never seeing the contradictory evidence.

Even members of this cabal of Experiencers might find their memories of the more exotic parts of the event bleeding out of recollection, until one day, all they remembered would be that they took shelter from a severe storm, maybe a tornado, which killed a close-by deliveryman. Nancy or Tom would probably remember it all, but Susan or Gilbert could very well not remember any of the weird stuff by this time next year.

Tom had noticed in his travels that only about five percent or so of people really saw what was happening in these events, and they usually kept the people they were with seeing some of the truth while they were with them. As soon as they separated, the others would begin to forget and rationalize it all away. If Susan were by herself right now, she would have already forgotten the true nature of the storm.

Somewhere between ten and twenty-five percent of the others who witnessed this sort of event knew something strange was going on, but couldn’t tell for sure what it was. For the five percent who saw it all, they seemed to pay the price for the gift, or was it a curse?

Tom almost remembered some past time when these things did not happen, but he could recall no details of that idyllic life. He thought that he might have once had a family, but he couldn’t remember who they were, whether they were a wife, or kids, or parents. He could not remember names, or places, or even the faces of these possible family members.

One of the weirder things that Tom had noticed was that while the general population could apparently not see these events, there were venues galore, such as that late night ‘coast-to-coast’ radio show where many of these events were discussed in nauseating detail. People apparently had no problem accepting the events as being the paranoid delusions of some hypothetical lunatic fringe, even though the persons testifying that they witnessed such events ranged from the Mad Hatter’s crazy cousin to Mr. So-Sane-I’m-Boring.

Tom sidled over to the television, which was languishing unloved in the corner, and turned it on. He used the remote he found nearby to surf for either news or entertainment, whichever he found first. It was news.

A perky young reporter was acting as an anchor and was in the midst of a report about the 7.2 magnitude earthquake that had just occurred in the middle of Mexico and had nearly leveled the nearby city of Nayarit. She was remarking on the random nature of earthquakes, and how nobody understood what triggers them. Meanwhile, the video rolling in the background was showing the reputed epicenter of the earthquake, which was experiencing continuous aftershocks, probably due to the large tentacle-like structures that were waving about in the air, and occasionally destroying nearby buildings. It was quite evident to Tom that those limbs, which Tom supposed were attached to an even larger subterranean creature, were the cause of the earthquake. It was equally obvious that neither the reporter nor any of the nearby spectators saw those limbs.

In the next half hour, Tom watched as the news reported on a town cleared of humans by Zombies, a cult that committed suicide after what appeared to be a mass demonic possession if one went by the inscriptions left behind, and a battle between two factions of the Muslim populations in Syria which were wholly caused by human agencies. At no point did the newscasters show any indication of reporting on anything unusual.

As Tom turned the television off and started thinking seriously about getting some shut-eye, Bailey started barking hysterically and staring at the ceiling. Tom spun around on his heel, trying to get a panoramic read on the surroundings.

What the hell is the matter with your dog? Gilbert asked, after opening his eyes from where he was resting them on the couch.

Tom was surprised that Gilbert was not unconscious, let alone aware of the dog’s activities. I don’t have a clue, but he knows what is going on better than that reporter did, so I am prone to pay attention to his reporting skills.

Fuck that. I’m catching some Zs, Gilbert lurched up and made his unsteady way through the door to the bedroom. Tom heard the door slam and lock.

What is it, Bailey? Tom asked the dog. What’s twisting your tail?

Bailey looked at Tom with a complex mixture of fear, confusion, and patience on his canine face. Tom was pretty sure that if he were in front of a mirror, he would see just such an expression on his own face.

Hey, it is getting really bright outside, Nancy said. She had been looking out of the window, and Tom had to agree that it was far brighter out there than the full moon that was out tonight than he could justify. A pure white light had chased all the shadows away, a light so bright that the shape of the nearby tree was blurring, and beyond all that could be seen was a glare.

Tom, this is scaring me! She whimpered.

Even Susan had started looking around in a drunken state of alarm. Bailey took this moment to resume his barking, low and serious. He also chose to make a strategic retreat to a location just behind Tom’s legs. Once in position, he ceased the loud barking and began a low-throated and continuous growling.

Tom decided to take a look out of the window himself and abandoned the brave canine to take up protective cover under one of the chairs by the table. Opening the window, he stuck his head out of the window and looked up.

As bright as it was, he could just make out a huge triangular craft floating silently above the house. The light seemed to be emanating from the edges of the craft. Tom felt Nancy nestled against his back, as she peered upward toward the craft. He felt her fingernails dig into his shoulder.

Tom looked back at her face, which was filled with terror and panic. Help me. It’s pulling me! She moaned. Her eyes returned to watching the craft floating close and overhead. It was obviously a compulsion that she could not resist. She stepped around Tom so that she was now between him and the window. The light seemed to be concentrating on her, and her eyes were locked on the sky until Tom forced her head around to look at him.

It is taking me, Tom! She wailed.

Tom let go of her head and reached for her shoulders so that he could pull her away from the window. As he made contact, his fingers went through her shoulder, meeting only a small bit of the resistance that they should have met. When he looked at her, he could see that she was slowly fading from view, becoming more transparent by the second. She was saying something to him, but it seemed to be a long way away. In a few seconds, she was gone.

Tom lost track of things for a few seconds after that, and only really came to himself when Susan raked him with her fingernails as she screeched and tried to climb out of the window after Nancy. Nothing she did for the next five minutes made the least bit of sense, so he said nothing and just held her tightly.

An hour later saw him, coaxing an additional couple of whiskeys into her system as proxies for tranquilizers. He had also found some steaks in the freezer, and had thawed one and fed Bailey. Susan now made a bit more sense than before, and they had been quietly talking about what they should do next for the last few minutes. Susan was insistent that they should go to her house, which was just about a mile down the road, while never once referencing Nancy or the fact that Nancy would not be coming.

A couple of hours later the dawn light was just beginning to stream, and they decided that now was as good a time as any. Gilbert was sawing logs, and could not be awakened by Tom or by Susan from the wrong side of a locked door, so they decided that they would go without him. In a few moments, Susan, Tom, and Bailey were off.

For the first thousand feet or so, they just strolled down the sidewalk, past the destroyed delivery truck, and along an interval of stone walling that was hiding some of the more expensive homes from view. After that, Susan insisted that the best shortcut led through some scrubby shrub-like plants with the random thorn in its branches. Soon, Tom had a series of long, shallow scratches on his arms and a feeling that Susan didn’t have a clue how to get to her house.

Finally, Susan looked like she recognized the area, which comforted Tom no end and started to lead the party more confidently. This interlude lasted all of two minutes until two things happened at once. Bailey’s ears came up, and the hackles on his back rose, and a slow and continuous growl came from him. In instant response, a low-pitched growling sound seemed to come out of the bushes from all directions at once.

Susan began to run in what Tom hoped was the right direction, but having no better plan, he and Bailey ran along behind her. In a few minutes, they were standing in an unkempt yard trying to catch their breath. Susan fumbled her keys out of her pocket and finally got the door to the house open. Luckily, Susan had transferred her keys to her pocket from her purse at the beginning of this trip. She was lucky to have retained the keys because she had abandoned her purse in terror in the bushes when the growling had begun.

2 Claws in the Night

Susan turned on the living room lights and locked the front door. Tom scanned the room for anything interesting or dangerous and only saw the old lady in the rocking chair smoking in the corner. He started to turn around to ask Susan about her but decided to look back at her to see what sort of description he could use to ask about her. She wasn’t there anymore. Even the smell of her cigarette and the old mothball smell that seems to be the defining smell of all old ladies were barely detectable anymore.

Tom had a twinge of memory about seeing her rocking in the corner. He vaguely recalled that he had seen her before in other places, like some Archetype. She was always in a corner, always rocking, and if she weren't shelling peas or husking corn, she would be smoking. Take your eyes off her for an instant, and when you looked again, she would always be gone.

Susan collapsed onto the couch and started sobbing into her hands. Tom felt like he should do something to console her, but he couldn’t think of anything that would do that, without leading to enormous complications. When he left this place, he certainly didn’t want a sidekick (Bailey excluded), he didn’t want the complication of a drunken woman that used sex for a consolation act, and he didn’t need any more drama in his life.

On the other hand, Nancy was gone, abducted by whatever controlled that craft and that light, and he really couldn’t blame her for falling apart with her daughter vanished like that. He was almost ready to engage in a consolation process that he would regret when Bailey went over and stuck his cold nose against her face between her cupped hands. She hugged him and increased the water-works.

After a little exploring, Tom located Susan’s stash of Canadian Mist and a baggy of marijuana with a book of papers inside. He carried these items to Susan, and she dislodged the dog from her embrace and rolled a joint. A few moments later, after she had offered Tom a toke or two, and been refused, she had smoked most of the joint and was half-way through the first glass of whiskey.

The next couple of hours found Susan slumped in a drunken snooze on the couch, calmer than Tom had ever seen her. He picked her up and carried her into the bedroom, tucked her in and closed the door. For the first time in days, he was in quiet surroundings by himself and could think about what he wanted to do next.

One thought that kept popping up was that he was tired of the desert. It was time to go somewhere with trees and rain. Having a bit of ocean nearby would not be such a bad thing, either. After he got some sleep and said his goodbyes to Susan, he would be on his way with Bailey in tow. Maybe he would leave tonight if it was quiet. More likely it would be tomorrow morning, though.

Tom made a bed on the couch, using a pillow and blanket he found lying on an easy chair in the bedroom. He stretched out on his bed, and Bailey hopped up and stretched out beside him. Ten minutes saw them snoring in unison.

HE IS WALKING DOWN a dirt path under trees in what seems to be a nice spring twilight, or what the old Celts used to call the gloaming. He is drinking a peppermint tea as he strolls along, and Bailey is walking beside him. Up ahead, he sees a very tall, thin man, wearing a wide-brimmed and tall hat, and wearing a long coat that is in no style with which Tom was familiar. Tom could not make out his face, but the tall man is busy blowing darts at a tree full of monkeys from the blowgun that he was holding. As Tom watches, the man blows a half-dozen darts toward their targets, and three times, a small monkey tumbles out of the tree. Each time, the Tall Man would pick the monkey up and place him in a small cloth sack.

The Tall Man stops and looks at Tom, and Tom could see that the man had no face; under the shadow of the hat’s brim was more shadow, which served as the Tall Man’s face. He gestures Tom over.

If ye be goin down this trail, ye be needing these token, The Tall Man said. He reaches into his pocket and produces a mercury dime with a bit of feather glued to it, and the dried up body of a medium-sized earthworm. He hands these ‘tokens’ to Tom and picks up his sack of monkeys. Whistling a jaunty tune, he starts off down the forbidden path.

TOM WOKE UP AND REALIZED that it was only a dream, a dream that Bailey was apparently still having if the little dog sounds and trotting foot movements were any indications. Tom spent a couple of moments contemplating the sheer incongruity of the dream components, and then he returned to sleep.

When he woke up, it was after 4 PM, and Susan was still sleeping in the bedroom. Bailey was pretending to be asleep, but Tom could see him open his eyes briefly from time to time, hoping to find that Tom had miraculously produced a fine dog dinner. After finding the makings for an egg, pancake, and bacon breakfast, and starting a pot of coffee to perk, Tom proceeded to do exactly that.

When he finished making the pancakes and the omelets, Tom forcefully shook Susan awake, and once she was seated at the table, he filled her and Bailey’s plates with the egg and bread concoctions, sided with strips of dead pig. Soon enough, all parties were engaged with the comforting task of filling their empty stomachs.

When they finally had finished eating, it was about 5:30, and the shadows were starting to get longer, sliding down toward the dark of night. As they sat with their coffees in hand, Susan started discussing her potential plans. She had decided that she wanted to go to her sister’s in Dilbert, New Mexico. She didn’t explicitly say so, but her plans seemed to include Tom coming along on the trip. Tom didn’t want to go with her, but he didn’t see a good opening for saying so.

Susan said that she had an old Caravan Voyager in the garage and that her last boyfriend had fancied himself a mechanic, so he had stocked the garage with tools and supplies. Would Tom check the van out, and see if it was up to the trip? Of course, he would.

By six o’clock, he was busy in the garage, checking the fluid levels, tires, hoses, and belts on the van. The hour saw the van with a new oil change, a new set of spark plug wires, and a retouch of the coolant. Tom gave her the once-over but could find nothing else significant to improve. Bailey panted his approval of a job well done.

Tom and Bailey went back to the house after Tom had washed up in the shop sink that Susan’s Ex had installed in the garage. Soon enough, he was nursing his fifth cup of coffee of the day, and the sun had done its setting thing. Susan looked as though she would be ready to go on her little adventure in another hour or so. Tom still had not come up with an excellent way to beg off the trip and was starting to think that maybe going east wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Once she got where she was going, He and Bailey could hitch across the country until he got somewhere in the Mississippi Delta.

Tom spent the next hour gathering up things that he thought they might need on the trip. He placed a box of tools and a gas can in the back of the van. He put together a bag of travel goodies, including food, reading materials, a can of orange spray paint that he found in the garage, some candles, and other miscellaneous items. This bag was currently in the living room, in case he found something else that needed to go into it. By this time, it was a little after eight in the evening.

Now that he had a chance to think about it, he was kind of looking forward to the trip. It would be good to be traveling again. He was sure that Susan would not be a great traveling companion, but she really needed his help, and he would be nearly a fifth of the way across the country, and if he had to, he could always pick a convenient fight with her.

He was ready to go. She wasn’t ready, and for the next forty-five minutes, she kept him waiting. Just about the time he was starting to rethink his plans, she came into the living room with a packed bag. It looked like she was finally ready. At this worst possible time, that was when it started.

A growling sound started outside. It sounded like unseen predators surrounded the house. Looking out of the window, Tom thought that he saw yellow eyes reflecting in the darkness, but he could not be sure. Once the sounds started, it took Susan about ten seconds to turn into a full-blown basket case.

Tom turned to see if there was anything in the travel bag that he could use in this situation, and that is when he saw him. There was a small, dark-haired man with arcane symbols tattooed across every bit of skin he could see. He was calmly sitting on the couch as though he had been there all day, watching football games.

Who the hell are you? He asked Tom.

Just what I was going to ask you. There is some sort of growling animals outside, and we were about to take a powder, Tom replied.

Last I remember I was lying down to take a nap, The man said. Oh, I get it. You are in my dream.

The man listened to the sounds of the growling for a bit. They sound a bit like the Dark Stalkers that hang out around Ulthar. All you have to do is draw a square or a circle and stay inside it. They can’t cross them. Running water works, too.

Tom went to the bag and rummaged around until he found the can of spray paint. He quickly laid down a square with the paint that included the couch and extended to the front wall just inside the door.

I understand now. You are in my dream, and this is the hard world adjacent to the dreamlands, the man said. I am going to wake up now. He silently disappeared as soon as