textfiles/magazines/TWILIGHTWORLD/twilight.world-2.5

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 Below you will find the text of TW 2.5. Please spread it. I will send the
list of subscribers in my next message.


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=-=ooo=-=-=ooo=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Richard Karsmakers                          "Thank God I'm an atheist."
 r.c.Karsmakers@stud.let.ruu.nl                      Anon (in the gutter)
 Editor of "Twilight World" on-line fiction magazine
 Snailmail:     Looplantsoen 50
                NL-3523 GV  Utrecht
                The Netherlands
          Oooo  Voice: +31-(0)30-887482 (All valid to mid '95 at least)
=-=.oooO=-(  )=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
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    \ (  (_/
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                         T W I L I G H T   W O R L D




                              Volume 2 Issue 5

                             September 10th 1994









 This magazine may be archived,  reproduced and/or distributed provided  that 
no  additions  or changes are made to it.  All stories in this  magazine  are 
fiction.  No  actual  persons  are  designated  by  name  or  character.  Any 
similarity is purely coincidental.
 If you bought this magazine through an expensive PD library,  get it cheaper 
somewhere  else next time because it's for free and not intended for  someone 
else to make money with.
 Please  refer  to  the  end  file  for  information  regarding  submissions, 
subscriptions, donations, copyright, etc.


= LIST OF CONTENTS ==========================================================


 EDITORIAL
 by Richard Karsmakers

 THE TROLL
 by Stefan Posthuma

 A PREHISTORIC TALE
 by Richard Karsmakers

 WADDAYA KNOW, JOE?
 by Mark Knapp

 OH YEAH
 by Stefan Posthuma and Richard Karsmakers

 WIRED
 by Niklas Pivic

 HOWARD'S END, OR, THE BEAST IN THE CELLAR
 by Richard Karsmakers


= EDITORIAL =================================================================
 by Richard Karsmakers


 The  summer is behind us.  Here it was hot,  though it might have been  cold 
where you were.  No matter what kind of weather was,  is,  or may be, this is 
the new issue of "Twilight World" and I hope you'll all like it.
 Thanks to you for the massive amount of literally *zero* people who  reacted 
to my request put in the previous issue's "Editorial". Because of this dismal 
failure I would like to put the request to you once again.

 Request:  I  am trying to establish how many people read  "Twilight  World". 
You'd do me a big favour if you'd send a postcard to my regular mail  address 
(see  end of file) with "Volume 2 Issue 5" and your email address written  on 
it. Cheers!

 Let's hope that I get plenty of reactions this time.


 Richard Karsmakers
 (Editor)

P.S. If you no longer want to receive "Twilight World",  *please* unsubscribe 
     and  don't  let  me wait for the messages  to  bounce  instead,  totally 
     flooding my email box! This especially goes for America OnLine people.


= THE TROLL =================================================================
 by Stefan Posthuma


 Written in an urge of inspiration. As usual, the end sucks (and won't mean a 
lot to people that aren't from the Netherlands).

 "Hungry", the troll growled quite stupidly.
 Cronos was a bit suprised by the enormous stupidity of the immense  creature 
standing  before him.  He had seen many creatures but the one now eyeing  him 
with considerable interest was certainly the most unintelligent of them  all. 
Somewhere in the back of his mind dawned the fact that he himself wasn't  one 
of the most brilliant ones either, but he felt strangely smart in the company 
of this troll.
 It slowly came to the conclusion that Cronos was in fact alive, and thus had 
to  be  killed because his mother always said that he could  and  should  eat 
everything that lived.  It decided that it would hit the quite edible-looking 
human on the head, then eat it. So it did.
 Cronos  was taken aback by the agility of the huge creature as  an  enormous 
fist hit him on the head. Slight feelings of confusion and pain troubled him. 
He decided the time had come for some defensive actions.
 The troll was surprised.  Normally,  its victims would totally disintegrate, 
explode  or at least die when it hit them on the  head.  This  one,  however, 
remained on its feet. Even more surprising, it hit back quite hard.
 Now it was Cronos' turn to be surprised. He had just applied a move that old 
Ninja  master  Hang Foy Soozooki taught him,  designed purely  to  obliterate 
completely any bone structure present in any living creature.  Normally, this 
move would surely kill his victims or at least render them incapable of being 
any threat to his precious hearing aid.  But this troll didn't seem to  react 
to it. It just looked a bit more stupid than it had done before.
 The  silence  that  followed  was a painful  one.  The  two  opponents  were 
pondering  over their next moves,  not very sure of what it would be  because 
their first moves had always been sufficient until now.  The troll decided to 
repeat the last move since it was the only one it knew.  Cronos was  prepared 
now  and evaded the blow.  The troll had put considerable more force into  it 
this time and not hitting Cronos severely upset its balance, causing its fist 
to impact on the left tunnel wall, creating a large hole in it. The troll was 
getting upset now because the tunnel was part of his home.  His mother always 
said he should keep his home nice and tidy.
 "Angry!",  bellowed  the  troll and fetched a piece of tree trunk  that  had 
functioned  as  a support for the tunnel.  Cronos tried another  one  of  his 
techniques on the troll,  resulting in an even more angry tree-trunk wielding 
creature.
 The troll swung the trunk in the direction of Cronos who quickly ducked  and 
applied a double leg lock on the ravenous creature. He slightly misjudged the 
momentum  of  the trunk;  the following chaos resulted in three  more  trunks 
being  torn from their positions,  not giving the tunnel anything to lean  on 
anymore.  The  tunnel,  after  having been lived in for  centuries  by  whole 
generations  of trolls,  decided that its time had come and  collapsed  quite 
dramatically.
 Cronos  felt a slight pressure on his chest as several feet of  rubble  were 
piled upon him.  Heavy breathing beside him reminded him of a very aggressive 
troll  and seconds later he was standing next to a partly collapsed  hill  in 
which he had only wanted to spend the night after fruitlessly searching for a 
certain  renegade  general.  The  fact that the whole country  had  now  been 
reduced to a pile of rubble and total anarchy ruled didn't seem to bother him 
at  all.  Back  in his mind lingered some sort of uncle  but  the  connection 
wasn't  really clear.  Anyway,  the troll was now busy removing  the  various 
chunks of hill from itself. It probably meant having to fight again.
 The troll wasn't happy.  His mother had always stressed that he should  keep 
his  home  tidy  and eat any strangers.  Now he  had  failed  her.  Years  of 
frustration finally came to the surface.  It started to cry.  First it was  a 
bit surprised by the water coming from its eyes,  but when he got the hang of 
it, tears came by the gallons.
 Cronos was a tough fighter. He had survived many battles on many planets and 
still  managed to keep his no-claim on his life  insurance.  Somehow,  crying 
always seemed to affect him.  No matter what cried,  gorgeous young female or 
ugly  troll,  the  one  piece  of his mind  he  had  always  kept  suppressed 
manifested  itself.  After a few moments his eyes started to fill with  water 
and after a few more moments,  he was standing besides the troll, sobbing his 
heart out.
 Suddenly,  Cronos  got an idea.  He started to rummage through  his  pockets 
frantically,  finally  to come up with a small coin he held in front  of  the 
troll enthusiastically. It beheld it with large, ignorant and watery eyes.
 "Even  Apeldoorn  bellen,"  Cronos  said  and  rushed  off  to  the  nearest 
phone booth.

 Written late 1989 or early 1990. Rehashed slightly, September 1994.


= A PREHISTORIC TALE ========================================================
 by Richard Karsmakers

  
 When he regained consciousness, the Timetraveller shook his head and moaned. 
He immediately felt a mindsmashing headache, throbbing through his head as if 
it wanted the very bones of his skull to burst at every single heart's  beat. 
He once more swore never ever to do it again.
 As his senses focused on the sights and sounds around him,  he noticed  that 
he  was indeed teleported (and even warped) to the era he was supposed to  be 
teleported (and indeed warped) to:  The Jurassic era,  a massive 150  million 
years ago -  there were ferns as high as three-storey flats, and all kinds of 
flowers  that  were to die out at the end of the  Cretaceous  era,  about  65 
million years ago.
 So   this   was  where  the   Interstellar   Palaeobiological   Regeneration 
Associations wanted him to work for some time to come.
 The Timetraveller shook his head again, and blinked his eyes.
 There  was  also  a rather enormous specimen  of  extinct  reptile  standing 
directly  in  front of him,  but this he did not notice until it  opened  its 
fangs  and the sun reflected on some terrifying rows of flashy white teeth  - 
with spots of bloody red on them as well,  so the Timetraveller was  somewhat 
startled to notice.
 A  large  piece of dripping wet meat - presumably its tongue -  was  licking 
them in what could only be described as quite a menacing way.
 The  Timetraveller was about to swear that he would never do it  again  when 
the rather enormous specimen of extinct reptile (further to be referred to as 
'Allosaurus') decided it had seen enough of this pathetic human and knew only 
one way to rid itself of such a minor irritation: Eating it.
 A  rather tasteless word that had something to do with used food passed  the 
Timetraveller's  lips  as he noticed the obviously foul intent of  the  giant 
reptile.
 The  Timetraveller  immediately grasped that it was of no avail to  try  and 
convince  Mr.  Hungry  Allosaurus of the disgusting taste of  his  flesh.  He 
pushed a couple of buttons on his portable time machine.
 "See  you  in ten minutes' time!" he said before pressing  a  purple  button 
labelled 'red'.

 Ten minutes later.

 The  Timetraveller noticed that his headache had virtually vanished when  he 
opened  his  eyes  again,  a mere second after  pressing  the  purple  button 
labelled 'red'.
 He saw the world what it looked like 150 million years minus 10 minutes ago, 
and had to admit that it hadn't particularly improved much to his liking.
 But,  just  like  he had hoped,  the enormous specimen  of  extinct  reptile 
(sometimes  also referred to as 'Allosaurus') had decided not to  think  long 
about the mysterious vanishing that had just taken place and had wandered off 
again.
 A  positively deafening sound of what could not be interpreted for  anything 
else  rather  than  some mega-amplified and  giga-boosted  earthquake  sounds 
roared  through the trees,  and Cronos' attention was instantly drawn  to  an 
enormous  specimen  of  extinct  reptile  (sometimes  also  referred  to   as 
'Allosaurus') that was experiencing some quite violent spasms behind a couple 
of  ferns.  It  was  balancing at the edge of a gap in the  ground  that  had 
definitely not been there a mere 10 minutes ago.
 And it was getting bigger as mere more seconds passed.  He blinked his  eyes 
in disbelief. Was his job that urgent?
 The somewhat outdated specimen of extinct reptile (which is indeed sometimes 
also  referred  to as 'Allosaurus') disappeared into  the  gap,  making  some 
awesome sounds of terror.
 The sound of the mega-amplified and giga-boosted earthquake all of a  sudden 
ceased, and the Timetraveller was even more than a bit shocked to notice that 
the Allosaurus had truly vanished (and indeed died).
 Holy macaroni!
 The  seismic activity in this region was surely not to be fooled with -  the 
guys at the Interstellar Palaeobiological Regeneration Association were  just 
in  the nick of time to send him over to teleport these dinosaurs to a  safer 
place.  And if he didn't do something *really* soon,  the dinosaurs would all 
die out...even before these giant animals would have had the decency to  take 
care  of  some more or less intelligent mammalian offspring  from  which  men 
would eventually evolve!
 He felt his strength already growing slightly weaker...

 Written December 1989.


= WADDAYA KNOW, JOE? ========================================================
 by Mark Knapp


 The  man  rolled  over with a grunt.  Clutching  at  her  pillow,  he  half-
consciously realized his wife had already left for work.
 After  using the bathroom and opening the shades,  he headed  downstairs.  A 
quick  breakfast of cinnamon toast and orange juice went down  without  being 
noticed.
 Remembering his schedule, he called a number from memory.
 "Quentin and Associates," the receptionist said.
 "Greg Quentin, please. Tell him this is Joe Brunswick."
 "One moment, sir."
 "Sir, Mr Quentin has no knowledge of a Mr Brunswick. You did say Brunswick?"
 "Yes,  that's right," the man answered,  feeling perplexed and not a  little 
bit  exasperated.  "Never  mind,  I'll call back when he's had  time  to  get 
organized."
 Joe hung up. Going out to get the paper to take his mind off this weirdness, 
he  patted his Weimeraner,  Bully.  The news was made up of the usual  random 
observations of untrained bystanders. Turning to the unpaid bills left on the 
counter,  he briefly scanned the gas bill,  phone bill,  electric...all high, 
but that wasn't unusual.
 Wait a minute,  he thought.  The bills were addressed to Frank Salmson.  Did 
the mailman get mixed up?  No,  it was the right address.  Very  strange.  Ah 
well,  someone got the address wrong.  Climbing the back stairs to the second 
floor,  he  tripped  over  his  daughter's  jacket;  then,  farther  up,  her 
schoolbooks.  "Kiddo," he called,  "time to get up.  And could you pick  your 
stuff up off the stairs?"
 "OK,  Dad," came the muffled reply.  Of course,  knowing his  daughter,  Joe 
thought,  she'll need to be woken up again in ten minutes.  He went into  the 
master  bedroom,  laid a sportcoat,  tie,  pants,  and yesterday's shirt  (it 
wasn't  all that dirty,  he told himself) on the bed,  and went next door  to 
take a shower.
 When he was done,  he dressed,  woke his daughter up again - making sure she 
was actually out of the bed - and went downstairs.  Joe wrote a short note to 
his  wife,  reminding  her  that he had a meeting  with  the  regional  Pepsi 
representative and so might be a little late.  Bully wanted to play,  so  Joe 
obliged him by throwing the tennis ball in the yard with him.  Then he rubbed 
the big dog's belly, told him to be a good dog, and hopped in his car.
 He almost took the wrong exit for his office,  but finally made it to Folsom 
Street. Off the ramp to the right, into the little court, and into the lot of 
his office.  It felt odd,  but he knew he was in the right place.  Gotta stop 
staying up so late, he told himself. I'm not so young anymore; up til two and 
I'm out of it all day.
 "Hi Cindy," he said as he loped through the door and back to his office, not 
noticing the receptionist's odd stare. She'd only been there three weeks, she 
mused, but he'd never forgotten her name before.
 Sitting  down  at  his desk,  he began to  feel  uneasy.  Someone  had  been 
rummaging through his papers,  he could tell. And, oddly...wait a minute. All 
the  correspondence was addressed to Frank Salmson.  What the hell was  going 
on?
 The  phone  rang,  startling  him.  "John Winters on  line  one,  sir,"  the 
receptionist said.
 He picked up the receiver. "Yeah?"
 "Hey, Frankie, how's it going?"
 "My name's Joe, not Frankie."
 "Yeah,  right.  Listen,  I talked to Marilyn about that plastics option, but 
the percentages were too high. Maybe we should shop it around a little."
 "Ah...sure, sure. See what you can come up with."
 "Right. See ya round, Frank."
 This  was  very weird.  He rubbed his temples,  wondering if he'd  been  out 
drinking last night.  Deciding he did feel a little out of it,  he called  to 
the receptionist. "Hey, Cindy, could you come in here?"
 "What can I get you," she said when she entered a moment later.
 "Nothing,  thanks.  I  just think I need to get away from work for a  while. 
It's been a long week.  Could you hold down the fort,  tell anyone  important 
I'll  call them tomorrow?  And,  if you want,  go ahead and cut out a  little 
early yourself. Say, around three."
 "Sure,  Mr.  Salmson.  I didn't want to say anything,  but you do look a bit 
piqued."
 "Uh...yeah. Thanks; I'll see you tomorrow."
 Hurrying to his car,  he wondered just what it was that he'd been  drinking. 
Was  he hearing wrong when she called him Salmson?  Or was someone pulling  a 
complicated practical joke?  He tried to think if he knew anyone who would do 
something this bizarre, but couldn't come up with anyone. Oh, well, some good 
food and an afternoon at the movies would take his mind off things.
 He caught two matinees at the multiplex theater built where wheatfields  had 
been  when he was a teenager.  By five thirty the day was all but  forgotten. 
The  growling in his stomach urged him to head home.  When he got  there,  an 
unfamiliar car was parked in the street outside.  Inside,  though,  he  found 
only his wife,  his daughter,  and the massive dog.  The car must have been a 
neighbour's new showpiece.
 "Hi honey. Hungry?" his wife said.
 "Boy, am I. And beat, too. Mind if I collapse on the couch?"
 "No, go ahead. Dinner's almost ready."
 He picked up the remote and flipped channels until he found the local  news. 
Raising his voice over the TV and the noises from the kitchen,  he called out 
"How was work?"
 "Well,  the new wing is almost done,  so it looks like I'll be staying  late 
the next few weeks moving the periodicals into it."
 "Bummer. Say, hon, there's some mail on the bookshelf that got misdelivered. 
Do you recognize it?"
 His  wife  leaned around the corner and glanced at the  letters.  "It's  the 
right address, hon."
 "No, I mean the name." She walked out this time, and picked up the pile.
 "Marion Salmson...Frank...Salmson family...hmm...no, it all looks right."
 He sat stunned for a moment.  The doubts of the morning crept back into  his 
mind.  "Uh...honey?  This is going to sound weird,  but...are you sure that's 
right?"
 His wife looked at him for a long moment. "Are you OK?"
 "I  don't know,  I really don't know." His wife came over and began  rubbing 
his shoulders.  "Something strange is happening.  I thought at first it might 
be a gag, or maybe some stress-related hallucination, but... listen. All day, 
everyone's  been calling me Frank Salmson.  But...it just isn't my  name.  Or 
doesn't seem like, it anyway. My name's Joe Brunswick. Isn't it?"
 She  looked at him again,  searchingly,  caringly.  "Honey,  you  are  Frank 
Salmson. I swear it. No joking. You haven't been drinking, have you.?"
 "No!  No,  dammit,  I'm completely sober. What the hell is going on here? Is 
everyone going crazy? Or, am I? I just don't understand."
 She came around the couch and sat in his lap. "It's OK, it's going to be OK. 
Maybe  this is some kind of minor nervous breakdown,  but  that's  OK,  we'll 
figure it out.  Don't worry,  I'll be here.  I love you,  you know that much, 
don't you?"
 "Yes...yes,  I know that.  And I love you. I'm just...not exactly sure who I 
am." She kissed his forehead, and he pulled her close.
 "The Channel 8 Six O'Clock News is brought to you by Kupp's Billiard Supply. 
'We give you our best shot.'" "Good evening,  this is Tom Malone standing  in 
for  Scott Stevens,  who's on vacation.  Our lead story tonight is a case  of 
mistaken identity.  Or, make that cases. Jeannie?" "Thanks Tom. That's right. 
Authorities in Lake County have received two hundred and eighteen reports  of 
an unusual sort of amnesia.  The victims,  all male, appear to have forgotten 
their names and those of their loved ones.  However,  the most unusual aspect 
of this psychological syndrome is that they all believe they have new  names. 
In fact,  they all believe they have the same name.  A cause has not yet been 
determined,  however,  food, workplaces, and homes are all being examined for 
possible  contaminants that might have affected the memories of the  victims. 
The  phenomenon was discovered when a man,  after being refused cash  at  his 
bank when he signed the wrong name to a check, began screaming at the tellers 
that  he  was 'Joe Brunswick' and had to be restrained  by  security  guards. 
Jamie Instrom is live at the bank right now. Jamie?" "Thanks, Jeannie. Second 
Fourth bank is on a quiet corner of the Hillside district..."
 The couple stared at each other with wide eyes.
                                                         Col's OH 3/16/93 MEK


= OH YEAH ===================================================================
 by Stefan Posthuma and Richard Karsmakers


 Whistling some kind of tune between his teeth,  the man put the pedal to the 
metal and had his car disappear from the fuel station in a cloud of dust  and 
dead ants.
 Would a camera have been aimed at this fuel station, it would have displayed 
the slow appearance of the somewhat puzzled form of a man in his mid-forties, 
straining to grasp something as the dust settled down around him.  He  wasn't 
puzzled at the enormous amount of dead ants in the car's tracks,  nor was  he 
wondering what the hell he was supposed to do with 9,000 Thanatopian credits. 
He  *was* wondering,  however,  why that dude had just filled up his  Pontiac 
Trans  Am with brown beer.  The thoughts of another person  exactly,  someone 
dressed in white who disappeared moments later.

 "Brown beer?!"
 The shopkeeper had looked at Warchild with an incredulous look in his  eyes, 
fingering  a  half-opened drawer for a weapon of some kind -  for  you  could 
never know.
 "But,  mister,"  the  incredulous-looking  man  had  continued,  "arms's  my 
business,  ya know.  I wouldn't wanna go sellin' booze when people a' wantin' 
arms, ya know. I'd be rippin' me own..."
 Warchild had cut the man short with a pan-universal sign of a finger on  his 
right hand.
 "I WANT BROWN BEER."
 Warchild  had repeated his demand with a kind of particular  'something'  in 
his  voice;  a 'something' that would have neatly fitted on someone like  the 
grim reaper.
 "Mind ya,  mister,  I would be sellin' ya beer if I had any,  ya know. But I 
haven't gottit. It's asimple as tha'".
 He had tried to sound as if he still has confidence in himself,  but he  had 
seemed to fail somewhere. He had almost started to believe that he was lying.
 "I WANT BROWN BEER."
 Though  it had sounded identical to Warchild's previous demand in  even  its 
tiniest aspects, the shopkeeper hadn't quite thought so. And the poor man had 
definitely believed he himself was lying now.
 "Okay,  okay,  mister,"  the  man had said with trembling  voice  and  sweat 
appearing on his forehead,  "I'll be bringin' ya a nice cool beer right away, 
mister! Brown beer, yeah, in a neat li'l bo'l."
 He had turned around and disappeared behind a door labeled "Private".
 Cronos had scanned the shop. Quite some interesting gear had been stacked on 
the shelves,  which would no doubt have enhanced his chances of surviving the 
intricate enemy activities on the fourth tourist world.  Had he wanted to buy 
any  of  them,  he  would have had to pay excessive  amounts  of  Thanatopian 
credits.
 Apart from him,  there had only been one other customer at the shop. Someone 
dressed in white, carefully examining a display of hypodermic syringes.
 After  about two minutes,  the shopkeeper had returned from behind the  door 
labeled  "Private" with what had seemed to look like some kind of  tube  that 
had  looked a bit like some kind of post-modern piece of space-age  weaponry, 
unfortunately aimed at the mercenary annex hired gun.  Warchild had not  been 
pleased. Not at all.
 With  a  rather tricky move,  Warchild had made the shopkeeper sink  on  the 
floor, suddenly weak at the knees and a whole lot of other parts of his body.
 Still,  however,  Cronos hadn't got what he wanted.  Neither had he found it 
when  he had headed back from the Fourth Tourist world to Earth.  So when  he 
visited  the  gas station and found a fridge full of it,  he handed  the  guy 
behind  the counter enough credits to buy the entire gas station -  providing 
Thanatopian  had any more value than monopoly money on this planet.  He  also 
found some gas.
 Since Cronos Warchild was trained to fight, not to think, he absent-mindedly 
put the beer in his car and drank the petrol, much to the amazement of an old 
man who just happened to be sitting in a rocking-chair on the porch, watching 
the  ants fullfilling their daily ritual of slaughtering enormous amounts  of 
other  ants in the eternal Battle of the Scarce  Picnic  Leftovers.  Warchild 
never noticed anything odd,  though he frowned at the unusual foam coming out 
of the nuzzle of his car's gas tank. The beer seemed a bit off too.
 So now he stood there. In the middle of nowhere.
 Maybe,  'nowhere' was actually a bit of an exaggeration,  but it  definitely 
doesn't  fall  into the confinements of this story's  boundaries  to  discuss 
whether  a  thousand square miles of bare desert sand (with a dune  here  and 
there) can be described as 'nowhere' or not.
 The  car  had  seemed to run smoothly for just about as  much  time  as  was 
necessary  to get him PRECISELY in the middle of this thing called  'nowhere' 
and  then had quite spontaneously ceased to operate in an enormous  belch  of 
fumes and a disgusting smell of rancid Brown Beer.
 After he had let the synonym of an animal's solid excrements pass his lips a 
great many times, he decided to get out of his burning excuse for a Pontiac.
 Just  at about that moment,  a guy wearing a small,  dark,  flat hat with  a 
ridiculous small erect thingy on top of it,  holding a bottle of red wine and 
a lengthily shaped loaf of bread, barged onto the scene.
 "Excusez moi?" the strange chap seemed to inquire.
 "? Whatthe.... ?"
 Completely  baffled to an extent Cronos had never before  imagined  possible 
(well,  it  was  universally known that the mercenary annex hired gun  HAD  a 
somewhat limited imagination - hence),  he looked around,  carefully scanning 
the surroundings for someone that might be jamming his newly acquired hearing 
aid.
 He  failed to see anything but enormous loads of sand grains  spread  around 
him on an area which he quickly estimated to be 986.54 square miles in  size. 
That, and the somewhat strange chap, of course.
 "Est'ce que je aider vous?" the strange chap inquired further.
 Warchild was now sure that no one could possibly be jamming his hearing aid. 
That  could  only mean one thing - he was being insulted in  the  rudest  way 
someone from Sucatraps could possibly be. And, with a short shock that lasted 
at  least  several scores of nanoseconds,  he saw that the  lengthily  shaped 
thing the strange chap held under his arm looked pretty much like a tube that 
had been shoved under his nose only recently.
 So he did what he was trained for to do in dangerous situations such as this 
one. Accompanied only by the sound of several millions of air molecules being 
savagely torn from each other,  his fist rocketed through the air,  impacting 
on  the  strange  chap with a rather unhealthy  speed  at  a  proportionately 
unhealthy spot.
 About  a quarter of an hour later,  a deafening 'boom' followed by a  softer 
'thud'  was heard by the gas station owner,  who was now discussing  red  ant 
picnic scavenging war strategics with the old man, after which they looked at 
the  approximate centre of 986.54 square miles of sand grains  with  slightly 
puzzled looks.

 Note:  Please  excuse  the authors of this story for their blatant  lack  of 
French  grammar.   Due  to  circumstances  that  fall  beyond  their  current 
intention  to reveal,  they both flunked this subject at highschool  and  can 
be safely said not to know any better.
 Except  maybe  for "Voulez vous couchez avec moi ce soire" - a  phrase  they 
both use every time they see someone wearing a small,  dark,  flat hat with a 
ridiculous small erect thingy on top of it,  holding a bottle of red wine and 
a  lengthily  shaped  loaf of bread - their French  can  be  considered  non-
existent.

 Cronos decided not to hang around the scene any longer.  The desert vultures 
where  already  noticing a heavily mutilated body in the middle of  all  that 
sand and were displaying a growing rate of interest for it.  Because he hated 
all  birds of prey,  vultures particularly,  he started on a brisk  trot.  He 
savagely  and  unwittingly  splattering some ants who  were  carrying  picnic 
remnants  with triumphant looks on their little faces.  Instead of  to  their 
nests they'd now have to take it to the Eternal Honeyjar.

 Note:  Recent research by reknown biologists has revealed that ants  believe 
the  world  evolves around them and that they spend their afterlives  in  the 
holy and indeed incredibly sweet and plentiful Eternal Honeyjar which  floats 
amidst  the remnants of the Great Picnic at the start of  their  World,  with 
scores  of  decaying  animal  remains nearby to munch on  (or  to  go  to  on 
posthumous honeymoons).
 It  is quite a well-known fact that,  each year,  more people who happen  to 
enjoy  a picnic get shocked by the ritual suicide of enormous hordes of  ants 
who hurl themselves into a honeyjar carelessly left open.

 Warchild  had  strolled briskly through the seemingly endless desert  for  a 
whole  lot of hours when he felt a strangely nauseating feeling in his  neck. 
At  about the same time,  from the shimmering air above the hot load of  sand 
grains came a shape.
 "Do you see those bilds, Sjau Long?" the shape said.
 The  voice wasn't meant to be heard by Warchild.  Instead,  a reaction  came 
from  a second shape that now appeared slowly above the  horizon,  shimmering 
and uncertain.
 "Yes,  honoled  mastel!  What ale they?  Alen't those vultules?" this  other 
shape now replied.
 Some  music  now also sounded across the many millions of billions  of  sand 
grains.  It  sounded like some kind of Oriental folk music,  and  the  lyrics 
seemed to go like this:

 "Blackened is the nonwolthy end
  Wintel it will send
  Thlowing each nonwolthy thing we see
  Into unhonolable obsculity"

 Then,  it  seemed to be cut off abruptly - as if the tape had been  damaged, 
savaged by an event somewhele...eh...somewhere in its owner's past.
 "See what I will do with those vultules,  noble applentice!" the first shape 
now said.  It started to make strange movements, not wholly unlike those made 
by someone dangling at the end of a ten foot rope without any ground support.
 A  shining  piece of metal could be seen,  thrown in the air by  the  shape, 
slicing  the genitals off one of the more eager vultures circling in the  air 
above it.
 The second shape waited several seconds, and then exclaimed:
 "All nice and well,  noble mastel,  I tlust that vultule will nevel have sex 
again, but I guess we will not be having soft vultule feathel filled cushions 
to sleep on tonight either, will we?"
 "I guess we won't," the first shape said.
 Cronos  looked at the shapes in bewildered puzzlement,  and after  loads  of 
long thinking (I suppose you know now how hard this is for him,  since he was 
trained to...well,  you know it by now) a reluctant remembrance shuddered his 
consciousness:  It was Ninja Master Hang Foy Soozooki, the guy who had taught 
him  the  move  that was purely designed to completely  obliterate  any  bone 
structure present in any living creature!
 Staggering,  licking his dried out, crusted lips, he stumbled slowly towards 
Hang Foy Soozooki and his servant annex apprentice, Sjau Long. These were now 
engaged  in a tea ceremony of enormous complexity,  involving the burning  of 
sand grains,  the inserting of precise quantities of honey in tea  mugs,  the 
purging of some dried out leaves in water, and the fencing off of a couple of 
hundred  frantically fanatic ants that seemed to have millions  of  perfectly 
valid reasons to hurl themselves into the Ninja Master's honey jar.
 Needless to say, each and every ant trying to do so was sent back home after 
having been rendered memberless.
 "Moo  Moo Moomoomooo..." Warchild tried to cry in some kind of happy  voice. 
Whilst  trying to cry out the Master's name,  the mercenary annex  hired  gun 
dashed (or, rather, clumsily crawled) forward.
 Neither  Hang  Foy nor Sjau actually seemed to find it necessary  to  notice 
him,  and quietly proceeded burning grains,  inserting honey,  purging leaves 
and performing mass micro-surgery.
 "Water. Please." Cronos said weakly.
 Sjau Long now seemed to notice him.
 "Water?" he looked at Warchild with the same kind of look that had  occupied 
the  face  of  the  mercenary  annex  hired  gun  before  -  one  of  puzzled 
bewilderment, that is.
 "Water. Please." Cronos repeated, even more weakly.
 "Oh! Watel!?", Sjau Long now enthused.
 "Water."
 There was now nothing left in Cronos' voice besides weakness.
 "Watel!"
 The  servant annex apprentice took an enormous jug in which there must  have 
been gallons and gallons of crisp,  clear and cool water. He poured it gently 
over Warchild's dried out-head and crust-covered lips.
 The  fata  morgana disappeared,  and Cronos only felt the harsh  and  bitter 
taste  of a relatively minor quantity of sand grains in his mouth as he  fell 
into the desert, face down.
 It  felt  to him as if someone was pouring down his aching throat  each  and 
every bit of sand to be found in the desert.
 It might be a wise idea, he thought to himself, to faint. So he did.

 The spiralling feeling of plunging into endless voids ceased only then  when 
he  impacted  on something that was quite awkward to impact  on.  Instead  of 
being nastily solid and quite splattering (like,  say,  a circus tent floor), 
it was very soft, and liquidish.
 Cronos  opened his mouth to scream in agony,  only to have it filled with  a 
large amount of the liquid.  It tasted very sweet,  and indeed very familiar, 
but he couldn't quite place it yet.
 Nor could he even pretend to like the fact that this liquid,  no matter  how 
good it tasted,  obstructed his breathing in a rather efficient way.  He also 
didn't like the slow sinking feeling he was experiencing.  He liked to be  in 
control of things, which he now most certainly wasn't.
 Taking  each  and  every  muscle  in his body to  the  very  limits  of  its 
capabilities,  he struggled to stay alive. When he opened his eyes and looked 
through  the thin layer of the thickish fluid on them,  he was  disgusted  to 
notice that a couple of rather large ants were at the verge up jumping in the 
fluid, too.
 Were they really wearing little sandals?
 They  made  a  sound that could not be mistaken  for  anything  else  rather 
than...chanting, really.
 One after the other, the ants started plummeting themselves into the mass of 
soft, sweet, thick fluid; a vortex of many times six huge insect paws.
 There were hundreds of 'em now.  Cronos tried to scream once more. His mouth 
got  filled  with the soft,  sweet fluid as well as several  dozen  ants.  He 
decided against screaming some more and instead just tried to  breathe.  This 
on its own was already hard enough, as his nasal openings were cluttered with 
ants, too.
 "Cronos!  Cronos"  he seemed to hear.  The voice floated like a  mist  would 
float over the endless marshes of Spargoflactic Yllozud.

 Note:  Many  light  years from Earth (or even from Sucatraps),  there  is  a 
planet  called  Spargoflactic  Yllozud.  It is by all  means  quite  a  small 
planetoid,  but  its  marshes  are  of  quite  gigantic  proportions  -  many 
scientists  believe that a freakout in the space/time continuum has  actually 
resulted in them being ENDLESS.
 Not the kind of marsh you would be happily flollopping around in if you were 
called Zem.
 Also not the kind of marsh where you would like to be part of the expedition 
that,  for 37 generations, has been travelling to that 'nice looking patch of 
hill on yonder horizon'.

 As  the  ants absorbed him,  Warchild made some rather  spastic  moves.  And 
suddenly he was floating through a kind of rotating warp tunnel that provided 
his retina with more different colours to absorb and interpret than the black 
eye  of  a  stained Frenchman lying despirited somewhere  in  the  centre  of 
hundreds  of square miles of desert sand.  He felt giddy  with  vertigo,  and 
tried  to grab hold of something.  Unfortunately,  there was nothing to  grab 
hold of.  With what seemed to Warchild like a deafening 'thud',  he landed on 
the floor of what,  after a couple of seconds' examination,  turned out to be 
some kind of bar.
 Lefty  was  behind the bar serving a drink.  The girl sitting  next  to  him 
wasn't extremely pretty,  but she sure had some legs down there. Cronos was a 
bit  surprised  by  all  this,  since nobody  seemed  to  notice  his  sudden 
appearance.  After  a few moments,  a man in some ridiculous white  polyester 
clothes came out of the toilet,  carrying a remote control and a red rose. He 
walked towards the bar and ordered a drink.
 "Hiya," the man said to Cronos.
 "Larry Laffer is the name, you look kinda strange," he said.
 Cronos considered his next move.  The man didn't seem a threat in any way so 
he  quickly discarded the thought of smacking the pathetic  jerk's  face.  He 
*did* notice a foul odour arising from the smooth jerk's mouth.
 "Hey.  Your  mouth  smells like the inside of a motorman's glove,"  a  voice 
said.
 Cronos looked around him in...well...puzzled bewilderment.  Or shall we  say 
'bewildered puzzlement'? Yes. Good idea. Anyway.
 "WHAT WAS THAT?" the mercenary annex hired gun inquired.
 "Oh,  really, that's nothing out of the ordinary," the slick jerk explained, 
"It's  just good ol' Al giving me some advise.  He tends to do that  now  and 
again."  With a slightly embarrassed look,  he produced a small spray  bottle 
from  the  inside  pocket  of his incredibly ill-fitted  suit  and  used  the 
contents on his oral opening.
 "It sure was about time, Larry," the omnipresent voice concluded.
 Warchild looked around him again, instantly reaching for one of his recently 
acquired  killer gadgets.  When he found it,  it turned out to be all  sticky 
with honey or something like that.
 Useless.
 "Cronos! Cronos!" another voice yelled.
 The jerk now also looked around him. That surely wasn't good ol' Al's voice; 
it  was  a voice that would have made the sound of Jessica Rabbit  seem  like 
that of an eighty-year-old-Napalm-Death-crying-grandmother in comparison. Not 
heeding it,  the smooth jerk went off to the toilet,  where Warchild's  super 
hearing  (aid)  noticed him talking to a bozo  about  roses,  and  afterwards 
drowning himself.
 There  was  one  other rather interesting door on the ground  floor  of  the 
establishment.  It looked quite sturdy and there was a small peephole in  it. 
After  walking  towards it,  the mercenary annex hired gun knocked  on  it  - 
accidentally knocking the door completely off its hinges.
 Behind  it,  a  rather fat pimp was watching a sleazy adult movie  ("John  & 
Marsha take a Bath"), who suddenly wore a somewhat frightened expression upon 
beholding the rather square silhouette in the door opening.
 "Er...shouldn't  you  just  say 'Ken sent me' or  something?"  the  fat  man 
ventured in a quite unusually subtle way.
 Warchild  was planning extensive apologies,  but "GRMPF," was all  he  found 
necessary to pronounce.
 "Er...yeah.  Er....if you wanna,  you can go upstairs and...er...  have your 
pipes cleaned...er....if you get my drift..." the pimp continued.
 Cronos'  facial  expression told quite clearly that he didn't  know  nothin' 
about  no  driftin'  - nor did he know anything about  cleanin'  (unless  one 
was talking about toilets in an Ambulor Eight Thai Boxing School).  He walked 
passed the abashed man who was very wise and decided to continue watching the 
sleazy movie.
 "Have a nice lay," the pimp muttered habitually.
 Upon arriving upstairs, Cronos saw a rather tarty girl lying on a small bed. 
She was reading the printout of some kind of on-line fiction magazine and was 
apparently enthralled by the adventures of one of the characters occurring in 
the introductory novella.
 "He  walked towards the bed,  wondering what the rather tarty girl might  be 
reading in such an unusually enthralled way," the girl read aloud to herself, 
"and  he  wandered why she read aloud.  Then the girl looked up and  saw  him 
standing - her squarely built Adonis, her hero of all quests..."
 The girl looked up from her reading to see Cronos standing.  Her eyes opened 
wildly, not entirely grasping the meaning of all that was happening. She read 
the next line of the printout aloud.
 "She  arose  from the bed,  screaming widly  about  male  potency,  enormous 
muscles,  square  build and a desire of fourteen hours of  passionate  sexual 
intercourse."
 Instinctively, the mercenary annex hired gun quickly looked around him. What 
to do now?
 As the girl was getting up from the bed, licking her lips and taking off her 
clothes,  he spotted some pills in the window frame.  He mistook them for the 
explosive  eggs of the Taroglyphoxian killer wale.  He decided to  lurch  for 
them. He made a run for what he considered to be his only means of saving his 
life  without getting dirty hands (and without getting some kind of  somewhat 
transferable  disease).  The momentum of his fear combined with her  passion, 
however, caused him to actually jump clean *through* the window.
 A  rather unattractive garbage container with a rather callous hammer in  it 
was  coming closer to him in a fashion described centuries earlier by  a  guy 
called Isaac.
 He turned around many times,  and suddenly there were colours. Many colours, 
indeed.  Even more colours than those present on the black eyes of a thousand 
million billion Frenchmen lying spread all over many 54 square miles of  sand 
grains.
 He felt giddy with vertigo (as usual), and turned and turned and turned...

 Independence Limited
 Freedom of choice
 Choice is made for you my friend
 Freedom of speech
 Speech is words that they will bend
 Freedom no longer frees you!

 The  song  was sung by a blue-haired creature with a tail and  yellow  eyes, 
circling  along with Warchild in the vortex of vertiguous vehemence.  It  was 
followed by about a dozen religious nuts, complexily floating within the same 
vortex  and yelling sentences which mainly existed of the word  "Blasphemy!". 
These,  in turn,  seemed to be followed by about two dozen large sandals that 
seemed to have been lost in all the nuts' enthusiasm.
 Two  seconds  later (well...give or take a couple  of  nanoseconds),  Cronos 
found  himself back in the enormous honeyjar,  every (EVERY) opening  in  his 
body  filled  with crawling and throbbing ants.  It seemed as  if  they  were 
actually building little ant homes in his organs, and were preparing for many 
posthumous honeymoons.
 "Cronos! Cronos!"
 A voice echoed through his subconscious consciousness as it were. He thought 
he must be dreaming,  for now he even felt clear and cool water being used to 
moisten his cracked lips.
 Dizzy,  he tried to open his eyes. He managed to do this quite well - though 
there was still a thin layer of honey obstructing his sight, at least much of 
it.  There seemed to be someone sitting on top of him,  sweeping ants off his 
face.  Normally,  this  would have resulted in immediate termination  of  the 
creature in question, but this one was different...
 His eyes had trouble in convincing his brains what they beheld.
 A  woman,  wearing a white robe (on the back of which was written in  large, 
red  letters  in  a font normally used  in  cheap  B-movies,  "Ambulor  Eight 
Hospital for the Very,  Very Splattered") was a few inches above him.  As  he 
looked  up,  he could see the loose buttons on her shirt and the  black  lace 
revealing itself teasingly. Her soft roundings were pressed against his chest 
and he could feel her breathing in a very special way.
 She  had  a  very worried expression on her face.  The face  itself  was  so 
perfectly  shaped  that Cronos almost had to avert his eyes to  prevent  them 
from  being  blinded forever.  Her eyes were faintly moist  which  made  them 
glitter as if they were prizeless diamonds catching the rays of the sun above 
which suddenly didn't seem to burn viciously anymore,  but merely  functioned 
as  a device to envelop her in an almost divine light.  When her long  fawnen 
hair  fell  forwards on his face,  he was overcome by a smell  of  blossoming 
roses on a warm summer afternoon in some distant and heavenly  country.  With 
one sweep of her arm,  she brushed aside her hair and continued feeding small 
amounts of water to him.
 "Cronos",  she  whispered  in a voice so clear and so full of  emotion  that 
tears welled up in his eyes, "are you all right?"
 Cronos  swallowed some of the water and decided to stay still for some  more 
time so he could enjoy this with every fibre of his body.
 When she moved to take something from the little bag she was  carrying,  one 
of  the lower buttons on her shirt gave up and the sight revealed  to  Cronos 
was  enough to almost render him senseless again.  Never before had  he  seen 
such finesse,  or such perfect shapes. He decided to get up now before things 
really got out of hand. He didn't have any tissues handy.
 When  he stood up next to her,  swallowing heavily,  he saw that it was  the 
same nurse that had saved his life already once more.  And, so he was pleased 
to note, she still looked like an identical twin of Gloria Estefan.
 "Wooo  wooo," Warchild said,  his voice shaking,  trembling and  flollopping 
with emotions of extensive gratitude.
 "Hush,  hush,"  the  nurse whispered whilst holding one  of  her  delicately 
shaped fingers to his lips,  "don't talk,  beloved.  It brings you naught but 
pain."
 He  felt  kinda insulted by the sheer mentioning of the possibility  of  him 
being able to sense pain, but decided not to act and feign that he was indeed 
in severe pains.  Instinctively, he seemed to know that this was not going to 
be bad for him at all.
 He drew her slowly towards him, repeating his exclamation of gratitude.
 "Wooo wooo."
 "Don't, beloved," the nurse whispered.
 She  thrust her lips towards his,  unable to restrain her passion  and  love 
much longer. She ripped open his black leather jacket and closed her eyes.
 "Oh, Cronos!" she sighed passionately.

 BEEP. BEEP.

 Her lips froze in mid-thrust,  and her hands did likewise as they were about 
to let the heavy leather jacket drop on the desert sand.

 BEEP. BEEP.

 "Damn. Dr. Hamilton wants me at the Hospital," she concluded.
 "? Whatthe...?" Cronos uttered unbelievably.
 Completely  baffled to an extend Cronos had never before  imagined  possible 
(not  even  earlier  that day),  he looked  around,  carefully  scanning  the 
surroundings  for  someone that might be jamming his newly  acquired  hearing 
aid.
  Had  some honey come into this device?  Or were a couple of ants  having  a 
honeymoon gang-bang orgy in there?  Unfortunately for Cronos, nothing had and 
none were.
 "Got to go," the nurse said, adjusting her shirt.
 She  sensually  disappeared  in what seemed like a puff  of  pink  smoke.  A 
commonly  used  synonym for an animal's solid  excrements  passed  Warchild's 
lips.
 At  that precise moment,  an alien landed RIGHT before  him.   Warchild  was 
still busy being baffled with what had happened just now, so he really didn't 
know what to do with this new thing happening to him.
 It alighted gently on the ground,  and what little hum it had generated died 
away,  as  if  lulled by the afternoon calm of many,  many  square  miles  of 
desert.
 A ramp extended itself.
 Light streamed out.
 A tall figure appeared silhouetted in the hatchway.  It walked down the ramp 
and stood in front of Cronos.
 "You're a jerk, Warchild," it said simply.
 It was alien, very alien. It had a peculiar alien tallness, a peculiar alien 
flattened  head,  peculiar  slitty little alien  eyes,  extravagantly  draped 
golden robes with a peculiarly alien collar design, and pale grey-green alien 
skin  which had about it that lustrous sheen which most grey-green faces  can 
only acquire with plenty of exercise and plenty of very expensive soap.
 Cronos boggled at it.
 It gazed levelly at him.
 Cronos'  first  sensation  of  hope  and  trepidation  had  instantly   been 
overwhelmed by astonishment,  and all sorts of thoughts were battling for the 
use of his vocal chords at the moment.
 "Whh...?" he said.
 "Bu...hu...uh..." he added.
 "Ru...ra..wah...who?"  he finally managed to say and lapsed into  a  frantic 
state  of silence.  He was feeling the effect of having not said anything  to 
anybody for as long as he could remember.
 The  alien creature frowned briefly and consulted what appeared to  be  some 
species of clipboard which he was holding in his thin and spindly alien hand.
 "Cronos Warchild?" it said.
 Cronos nodded helplessly.
 "Cronos *Jehannum* Warchild?" pursued the alien in a kind of efficient yap.
 "Er...er...yes...er...er," confirmed Cronos.
 "You're a jerk," repeated the alien, "a complete asshole."
 "Er..."
 The creature nodded to itself,  made a peculiar alien tick on its  clipboard 
and turned briskly back towards its ship.
 "Er..." said Cronos desperately, "er..."
 "Don't give me that," snapped the alien. It marched up the ramp, through the 
hatchway and disappeared into its ship. The ship sealed itself. It started to 
make a low throbbing hum.
 "Er...er..." Cronos tried to shout, and tried to run helplessly towards it.
 The  ship  made  somewhat more sound,  heaved itself  up  in  the  air,  and 
disappeared in what seemed like a fata-morgasmic blur.
 Totally abashed,  shaken, lovesick and (let's not forget) insulted, Warchild 
stumbled  further.  The  sun  was sinking slowly behind a  couple  of  highly 
unromantic  sand dunes.  If Warchild would have been in  better  spirits,  he 
would have chanted something like,  "I am a poor lonesome mercenary,  and far 
away from home....."
 But he wasn't,  so he couldn't and therefore didn't.  In fact, he decided to 
pass  out  once more,  falling down quite dramatically.  In  the  process  he 
ruined the first date of two teenage scorpions that were brutally obliterated 
by Cronos' bulk.
 When he regained consciousness,  he found himself in a clean, cool bed. When 
he looked up, he saw a very familiar face.
 "Korik!!" he exclaimed full of joy.  Finally,  a trustworthy face. Would the 
madness finally be over?
 "Hi Cronos!" Korik said,  a load of sorros falling off his  shoulders,  "you 
sure are lucky I got tired chasing all those celebrities and deciced to  take 
a nice,  long walk through the desert. You were pretty much dead when I found 
you."
 Things  could  have  been worse,  but could have  been  better  too.  Cronos 
Warchild rescued from pending death by Korik Starchaser, probably the biggest 
git this side of Klaxos Nine.
 Korik  had  recently  got the headlines when he finally  got  hold  of  Miss 
Fragilia Franatica,  the second Princess of the Zantogian Empire. This Empire 
spans  the  larger parts of the eastern spiral arm of the Galaxy  and  is  so 
ginormously wealthy that their Royal Vault covers the outer three planets  of 
the Zantogian system.  Since she is still single,  she is the most wanted and 
also the most famous female in the Universe (even the unknown bits).  Anyway, 
he  got  hold  of her in a very literal way and  her  bodyguard  had  bluntly 
removed  him from her in front of approximately 600 billion viewers  watching 
the  Annual Washing of her Armpits.  The humiliation was  complete  when,  in 
front of those same 600 billion viewers, the princess knocked him out.
 "So  I found you lying there," Korik continued,  "babbling about nurses  and 
insults and ants and honey."
  "Where am I?" Cronos inquired,  glad to have regained the ability to  utter 
anything other than "moo's" of various length and intonation.
 "You're in the Second Desert Hospital For The Very,  Very Dried Out,"  Korik 
replied.
 "Oh..."

 "Hungry", growled a shape in the bed next to Warchild.

 After  a  lot of rummaging in the dusty parts of his  brain,  the  mercenary 
annex  hired  gun recognized the phrase and remembered  vividly  wrestling  a 
ghastly  creature  in a dark tunnel.  It was the sort of  creature  that  ate 
innocent Hobbits and turned to stone when the sun had its rays fall upon it.
 Immediately,  his reflexes took over and in a frenzy of hard-core action and 
deadly  gadgets he savagely ripped the sheets from the bed where  the  sounds 
originated,  ready  to  turn  the shape into something round  and  flat  that 
Italians like to eat. It was quite a surprise to see him moving this fast and 
agilely considering his state.
 Only  barely in time did he recognize the fragile human that turned  out  to 
have uttered the aforementioned phrase.  Warchild's monomolecular - and  thus 
infinitely  sharp - dagger was hovering mere millimetres above the throat  of 
one of the authors of this piece.
 "STEFAN!!" he yelled.
 "Cronos!!" Stefan muttered, his voice still uncertain if it would be wise to 
mutter anything at all.
 There  was a sudden movement in the bed on the other side.  Warchild  turned 
sharply, observing the emerging human.
 "RICHARD!!" he bellowed.
 "Cronos!!" Richard exclaimed, not bothering to mutter since he didn't have a 
frighteningly sharp dagger hovering above his throat.
 "Uuuhhh...Cronos...could you please remove that knife?", Stefan probed.
 "What??  Oh  yeah...sure." The absurdly dangerous weapon  disappeared  wityh 
insane speed somewhere within Warchild's hospital outfit.  He  flinched,  his 
eyes  crossed.  The  two authors looked at a stain of red that  appeared  and 
increased on the meticulous white of the pyjamas.
 "I told you," Stefan said, "it's no use ending a story like this."
 "Maybe," Richard replied, "introducing ourselves broke a few unwritten story 
conventions too many."
 "And let's not forget Cronos' skin," Stefan remarked.
 "And that," Richard said, in thought.
 Someone  was  thinking  of inhuming the nasty person who  had  designed  the 
dagger's sheath.
 At that moment the door opened. Gloria Estefan walked in and started to sing 
"1...2...3".  And that rhymes with "happy" so that's how the story eventually 
ended.

 Original  written  spring 1990,  rehashed September 1994.  Lyric  bits  used 
without permission.


= WIRED =====================================================================
 by Niklas Pivic


 There  was  once a person called Wilma Thearson.  Wilma had worked  for  the 
"National  Publicist"  for twenty years,  and was now in her  early  forties. 
Wilma was the sort of person who didn't have many friends, mainly because she 
wouldn't change her principles - or anything other - for anyone.  Some called 
her obnoxious.  Nevertheless,  Wilma was a widow, and her husband had died an 
early death, which was someone she rarely talked about. Her friends sometimes 
caught her talking about him in a spiritual sense, but never dared to ask her 
about him, not for any reason.
 Now,  Wilma didn't have a lot of life.  But at this time everything  changed 
for  her.  One  of her friends asked her if she wanted to  join  her  working 
nights at the municipal greenhouse (!) with small things like mending  broken 
pots,  planting flowers,  etc. Anything a greenhouse had to offer, for short, 
come  good and bad.  She accepted it,  hoping it would decrease her  sadness, 
which she almost always feltinside.  One night, she met Arthur. Arthur showed 
to  be what Wilma called "a perfect gentleman",  who was in his late  fifties 
and  made  her  feel  young again.  And happy.  They  started  going  out  to 
restaurants, and suddenly Wilma smiled when she was with her friends, telling 
them  of what had happened on her latest meeting with Arthur.  Her  pessimism 
almost  vanished.  It almost was as if she were brought back to  her  youth's 
days,  when there were no troubles at all. Then Arthur made her the proposal. 
They were getting "hitched properly", as she told her friends.
 There was a big ceremony,  almost all of their friends attending,  but  only 
Arthur's  father - their other parents were dead - came,  leading him to  the 
podium and Wilma walking by herself. They were happy, very happy.

 At  the wedding night,  after a lot of  drinking,  singing,  dancing,  etc., 
Arthur  carried  Wilma over the threshold and they made  love.  Some  minutes 
after,  Arthur was excited.  He was very keen on showing some kind of machine 
to Wilma,  which was supposed to be "a blast".  She waited for him to  unpack 
some  kind  of strange-looking case he had under the bed,  and in  some  way, 
connect it *between* the phone cable which went to the phone, standing on the 
bedside-table.  The machine which seemed to split the cable,  consisted of  a 
box with a tube in the middle, sticking out at the edges (up and down).
 "Wilma,  you know I wouldn't do anything in the world to hurt you, now would 
I babe?" Arthur asked Wilma, looking at her excitedly.
 "I do know that,  Arthur, but what's that machine for?" Wilma asked, looking 
awkwardly at the machine which AT&T didn't put there.
 "Darling,  you  know that I've been busy these few days before the  wedding, 
right? I mean, except for the *normal* absence?"
 "Yes?"
 "Well,  I've  been  putting the finishing touches to this  little  machine," 
Arthur  said,  pointing  to the machine.  "It's going to be  our  own  little 
pleasure-dome!"
 "Oh yeah, how?" Wilma asked, raising a brow and a corner of her mouth.
 "Well,  I'll show you," he said, putting the machine on his side of the bed, 
now  sitting on the floor with the machine between him and her.  He  suddenly 
inserted  his right index-finger into the tube and said "Now all you have  to 
do  is to press the number I'll be telling you," at the same time as he  gave 
her a machine, oblong, with a lot of digits and a button with an arrow on it.
 "But what's going to happen?" Wilma asked.
 "Oh, just complete pleasure," he answered, smiling wide.
 He did what he instructed her to do, pressing the right buttons.
 "Now,  point  the controller towards the machine," he instructed  her.  "And 
press the button with the arrow on it." Wilma did so.
 "All we now have to do is wait." he said,  smiling and sitting with his legs 
crossed.

 A minute passed. "Here it comes," he said, watching Wilma as she pulled back 
a little to her side of the bed.  "No,  nothing bad is going to happen to me, 
even  if it looks that way--" He was interrupted by strong  convulsions,  his 
body turning straight on the spot,  having spasms like an epileptic during an 
attack.  "Arthur!" was all Wilma could say.  Suddenly Arthur came to.  He sat 
straight  up,  looking at Wilma as though he had slept for ten hours and  not 
had seen her since. "It was terrific," he said, looking at her terrified eyes 
through his calm ones.  "Nothing to be afraid of.  Mixing electrical currents 
by adding my own machine to it,  suddenly changes a person's vibration level. 
You  feel  like you could take over the universe or something!  Gives  you  a 
*great* self-confidence, anyway. I thought you'd like to try it," he said, as 
he climbed onto the bed, finally kissing Wilma on her mouth.

 "I...I..."  was all Wilma could say,  as she pressed her right hand  to  her 
chest, looking into Arthur's eyes with her very opened ones.
 "Trust me. It will take you to other worlds." he said, kissing her again.

 Wilma lay down, the bed and other things around her carefully put away, with 
her left-hand index-finger in the tube.
 "Don't worry," Arthur said, pressing a lot of numbers on the controller, and 
then, pointing it towards the machine, pressed the arrow.
 "That  should  do  it,  my dear!  You'll feel like a queen in  a  matter  of 
seconds!  Nothing's too good for my lovely!" he said,  smiling and  caressing 
her  face.  Suddenly he looks into her eyes,  and doesn't look as nice as  he 
previously  looked.  His shape changes,  turning into a whirl-pool of  images 
from their wedding, the day they met, etc. Suddenly the pictures aren't post-
Arthur anymore.  They reach back.  Long time back.  Limitlessly.  Colours and 
shades are not of any importance anymore. She knows how the Universe is built 
up, and she has reached her apotheosis.

 Arthur  is  no  longer of any importance.  The world is hers  any  shred  of 
humanity  flows  within  her  blood.  Anything else  stands  as  a  speck  of 
intelligence  within her,  the Earth itself is no longer any intelligence  to 
speak of,  Time isn't any problem,  there are NO LAWS for her anymore. She is 
no longer one with the universe. She Eats the Universe-.

 "Hey kitten! Wake up! You've been in there for a full minute! That's enough! 
Anyone can't stand that much power at first! Up!" Arthur's voice came ringing 
out to her.
 Wilma suddenly felt like someone had given her a  thousand-dollar-note,  and 
then ripped it to pieces. She slapped Arthur.
 "You idiot!  How dare you!" she howled at him,  discovering nothing but  the 
way her finger still was stuck to the machine.
 "Hold on! Hold on!" Arthur said, as he tried to grab her hands.
 "What's this? First you show me something... Something...-"
 "Yes..."  he  grabbed her hands.  "You've entered a world only we  two  know 
about.  I've  been developing this for the last five- "But...  But..."  Wilma 
started shaking the machine like nuts, when phone started ringing.

                                    *****

 When Wilma woke,  she saw Arthur lying in a pool of blood across the  floor. 
She looked at her hand and couldn't see her fingers. Or the rest of her hand. 
Her ex.  hand was covered by the tube, which had increased, becoming one with 
it.
 What  we (the Netrunners) see at the screens everyday had become one of  her 
everyday impulses.  She was connected. The net had absorbed her totally. What 
she knew was the everyday fantasies coming directly from us,  The Netrunners. 
Everything she had ever known became none, and her psyche became the net. She 
controls us everytime we think of her and vice versa.  Her brain is no longer 
one with "the universe".  It doesn't have to be "fantastic".  Look at what we 
have and try to improve this instead of dreaming.  Or shall we skip the whole 
idea for something new?


= HOWARD'S END, OR, THE BEAST IN THE CELLAR =================================
 by Richard Karsmakers


 I will not have it said that I am some kind of deranged person,  not by  the 
mere  fact that I have borne witness to the events I shall relay  henceforth, 
extraordinary as they are.  Even though people have been avoiding me of late, 
pulling up collars and urging their offspring inside with hushed whispers and 
agitated motions, I am still quite certain of my sanity. Yet I shall no doubt 
acquire repeated frowns of your brow once I have disclosed to you in full the 
extent of the horrors I have experienced ever since I moved into that old and 
rather dilapidated house in Providence, Rhode Island.
 Having  graduated  from University last summer,  I had  spent  some  initial 
months hitchhiking,  breathing in the air of my first true freedom and seeing 
many  quaint and sometimes truly beautiful sights.  From car to  truck,  from 
truck to van I went,  stepping into worlds I had never seen, and leaving them 
when the experience became either uncomfortable or somehow claustrophobic.  I 
made casual acquaintance of many people, until in the end my wandering spirit 
died, or at least fell asleep beyond rekindling, and I became gradually aware 
of an ever keening desire in myself to settle and join the life I intended to 
lead until the day of my retirement or my getting tired of it,  whichever was 
likely to happen first.
 Having  had  writing ambitions for as long as I remember,  I  longed  for  a 
somewhat  secluded residence,  having always cherished the inspiration  often 
brought  upon  me by the silence of loneliness,  the gothic quality  of  dusk 
outside town,  the rustle of the wind through the woods and the eerie  sounds 
of nature at night.  I sometimes think my writings saved me from a total loss 
of reason, even after that one terrible night that...
 But no,  allow me to relate to you the story from its very  beginning,  from 
the  moment I first caught sight of my new domicile to the moment that  these 
people  came to fetch me and locked me in the dreadful,  half-dark room  with 
its by now familiarly damp, fungi-bespecked stone walls, leaving me only with 
the few writing utensils I employ to trust to paper my story now.  There  are 
still a few hours left before the lights are put out,  which will bring to me 
yet  another gloomy and sleepless night pregnant with the hauntings  of  dark 
memories  -  memories so penumbral I would myself not  have  considered  them 
possible if it hadn't been me they were haunting.
 It had been one of those almost proverbially sunny days,  one of those  days 
one  which fate smiles benignly and everything happens the way it  should.  I 
went to a Providence real estate agent's to enquire if perhaps there would be 
any  vacant properties to let.  I had thought of purchasing,  but  decided  I 
would need my scant savings for other things first.  Once writer's wealth had 
found  me - if ever it would - I could always look out for something  to  one 
day call my own.
 As it was,  however,  there was little choice for me. There were only two or 
three places to let,  of which all but one were too small and located  rather 
in  the centre of town,  far away from the silence I would need to strike  my 
inspiration's  light  and at too large a distance from  a  healthy  morning's 
stroll  through  the forest I longed for.  The one left was  a  rather  large 
house,  built  of  wood and looking all but dilapidated.  Upon  studying  the 
picture in more detail a clerk came up to me - in retrospect he seemed  quite 
eager  for something - to tell me that in fact the house was in  pretty  mint 
condition  despite  its outer looks,  and that the last  previous  owner,  an 
elderly lady,  had passed away fairly recently.  The clerk himself could have 
passed for the very old woman's husband,  for he appeared haggard and ageing, 
dressed stiffly,  balding,  with two patches of grey hair hiding part of  his 
ears and the arms of his glasses. Something about his disposition also seemed 
to imply a personal involvement, perhaps a more than casual acquaintance with 
the deceased.
 I imagined the place being quite deserted save six or seven cats that  would 
all purr and rub my legs as I walked in, a new owner of the place. I imagined 
its dank smell, the hairs on the couch, a layer of gathered dust on a dresser 
the  next  of kin had forgotten to cover with linen.  I imagined  the  stairs 
making  woody noises under my feet as I ascended to the top floor landing  on 
my way to pick out a room where I would henceforth put myself to  sleep,  and 
decide  upon  another  room  where I could  put  my  typewriter.  This  would 
preferably have to be one with a hearth.
 Despite the fact that the house,  perched on a small hill with a bare valley 
below and dark green forests behind,  appeared much like one of those  places 
where women were bloodily knifed to death in showers,  I decided to take  it. 
The rent was affordable,  and as it was the horror genre I wished to  explore 
and  possibly  redefine with my future writings I estimated  this  particular 
house  would  be all the more inspiring for my work.  I decided to  keep  the 
cats, should there be any.
 When  I  nodded and asked more as to the conditions of rent  and  where  the 
document  was  that I had to sign,  I could have sworn I heard the  man  sigh 
profoundly.  At the time I didn't make much of it, but now I know why the man 
let out that obvious sign of relief.  I wonder if he knew anything about  the 
*real* horror,  anything other than the superstitions that might have  roamed 
the  little  village,  preventing  any of the locals  from  wanting  to  have 
anything to do with the house or its inhabitants.
 That might also have explained the fact that none of the agency's  employees 
seemed at all willing to show me the way to the estate and there give me  the 
guided  tour I had expected came with any such agreement.  The same man  that 
had  uttered  the  deep sigh handed me the key,  and I  distinctly  recall  a 
lingering sense of guilt in the way he looked at me - and kept looking at  me 
until I left the office and had disappeared out of sight.

 If anything, the house looked even more desolate in reality than it had done 
on  the picture.  It still appeared as if it was falling apart at the  seams, 
though,  and  I can tell you that I was not particularly looking  forward  to 
autumn,  when nocturnal darkness would fall early and hide from view the bits 
that  would  be torn off if any storm dared tug at the  ancient  woodwork.  I 
looked  around me.  Something was distinctly discomforting,  but  I  couldn't 
quite  put my finger on it.  The sun was already setting,  and in the  valley 
below  a few lights on farms and homesteads had already been switched  on.  I 
estimated the nearest to be about two or three miles off,  but the  gathering 
dusk made it difficult for me to estimate it more accurately.
 I walked up the garden path, at which time it became apparent what seemed so 
odd.  There were no sounds. Even though I saw the woods behind the house move 
to and fro gently in the evening breeze, the leaves made no sound whatsoever. 
All I heard was the soft wind in my ears, hardly enough to blot out all other 
noises.  At the time,  however, like the unconscious knowledge of the clerk's 
sigh lingering somewhere within a deep recess of my mind,  I made no more  of 
it.  It was just a really quiet late summer's evening. Probably the wind took 
the voice of the forest away from me, back to its own centre.
 When  I  stood in front of the door I put down my  luggage,  fumbled  in  my 
pockets for a while trying to find the key.  Once retrieved, I inserted it in 
the  lock and turned.  There was a twist,  some resistance,  a  click.  After 
opening the door I went inside and locked it again. The typically cool are of 
a perpetually shuttered house embraced me.
 My  premonitions about a cat had been right.  A lean black animal with  eyes 
shining bright yellow in the half-dark descended the stairs and came  towards 
me, rubbed my leg for a while and then lost interest.
 There was quite a stench.  I couldn't quite identify whether it was just the 
dank  dustiness  of a long-empty home or something else.  I  put  my  luggage 
inside  and closed the door behind me.  The stench seemed to grow.  I had  to 
find out where it came from.  I followed my senses,  which let me go down  an 
old  and rather noisy stairway to the cellar.  I fumbled for a light  switch, 
found  it,  flicked it,  and found a pale light emerging from a single  light 
bulb in the middle of the cellar.  There was a boiler,  the kind that  groans 
and  clanks when toiling but that currently wasn't active,  as well  as  some 
half-decomposed old paper piles. The smell gathered intensity. I knew what it 
was.  It  was the smell of death.  Maybe the cat had a private store of  dead 
mice or rats down here.  I followed its black form around a corner in the  L-
shaped room,  suddenly to find my stomach twisting.  I had to swallow to keep 
from  retching  too  violently as I saw about half a dozen  dead  cats  lying 
there.  They were partly decomposed, their eyes glassy and dull in the scarse 
light,  small  insects crawling over the fur and partly  exposed  innards.  I 
could have sworn the cats had died of fright;  I am not quite sure what  cats 
look  like when they're scared out of their skulls,  but I reckoned it  might 
very well be the way these cats looked.  The teeth were visible like those of 
an angry cat, the hairs on their backs raised in post-mortem.
 I went back up, switching off the light as I left, resolving to clean up the 
whole cellar the next day.  I was beat,  for some reason or other, and wanted 
first to go to bed and have a good night's rest.  The one living cat followed 
me  up  the  stairs.  It seemed to show no affection but a need  to  join  me 
upstairs,  as if being all on its own was simply too bleak a prospect to  the 
animal. I didn't think much of it, though, at the time.
 Little did I know of length of the night ahead of me.
 I am not easily frightened,  nor afraid of the dark,  but at night the house 
seemed to have its own subtle means of producing inexplicable  sounds.  Never 
were  they actually clear enough to be able to tell their cause.  Whenever  I 
had  identified a specific sound to listen to with more attention it  ceased, 
to  be  replaced  by another sound that took a while  to  isolate,  and  then 
disappeared again to be replaced by another.  It was like looking intently at 
a  star in the sky and suddenly seeing it disappear when looking straight  at 
it. Somehow the sounds seemed to want to elude me.
 At  some instants I could have sworn to hear the cellar stairs making  their 
familiar creaking noise,  as if someone else,  *something* else,  was in  the 
house. Surely I had locked the front door? I knew I had.
 At  just  past  midnight the cat starting making a  strange  whining  noise, 
something quite unlike the sounds I had ever heard cats make.  I had left  it 
outside the bedroom door,  as I wasn't wont to have a cat on the  bed,  which 
was where they were most likely to turn up eventually if only you'd give them 
the  chance.  I had once read a book where mention was made that  cats  could 
steal your breath away if they slept on your chest,  but I am quite sure that 
had been no part in my decision to leave it outside.
 I sat up straight,  trying to establish the reason for the cat's discomfort. 
There were some sounds,  like there had been all along, again seeming to want 
to  elude me.  I lit a candle and got out of bed.  The cat seemed to  startle 
from  my appearance through the bedroom door and scratched viciously  at  me, 
lacerating my pyjama trousers and tearing my flesh at the surface.  I  cursed 
and tried to kick the cat but already it was gone.
 It struck me that the cat seemed to want to evade being close to the  walls, 
as if it were playing some childish game with deadly seriousness.
 I touched my leg.  It might be torn but barely bled.  I probably didn't even 
have to get a tetanus shot.
 When my attention once more shifted from my leg to the house,  the noises  I 
heard  seemed louder.  Moreover,  they seemed to come from  downstairs  quite 
explicitly.  The  cellar?  Were there rats,  feasting on half a  dozen  cats' 
mortal remains?
 My cat suddenly stood still, tail curling and twisting strangely and somehow 
significantly,  in front of a door to a room I had not yet explored.  The cat 
made  a  frightful  noise,  then attacked the  door,  started  scratching  it 
viciously.
 I walked to the door and held the knob.  It was cold to the touch.  The  cat 
retreated  when it sensed my intent of opening the door.  I could have  sworn 
there was a presence in the room, but the feeling disappeared at the instance 
I turned the knob and pushed it open.  There was a slight woosh of air,  cold 
and unmistakable,  a draught probably. Next instant it was gone. I closed the 
door behind me, feeling a perverse desire to cover my back.
 The flickering flame of my candle threw strange shadows across the table and 
books  that  seemed to be the prime feature of the small room.  There  was  a 
window  in  one wall but its heavy curtains were drawn.  Had it  been  day  I 
seriously doubted there would have been any more light.
 I looked up and down the walls.  There were strangely surrealistic pictures, 
some rather scary.  Some portrayed church towers around which haunting shapes 
had  somehow draped themselves.  Others showed a lonely writer with  a  large 
looming *something* behind him,  threatening to strike at the first opportune 
moment.  The most terrible of all,  and I couldn't help but be fascinated  by 
it, was a huge demonic monster stretching out its clawed forelimbs to a water 
vessel,  the background filled with unnaturally large blocks,  like slabs  of 
concrete,  tilting  halfway  out of the ocean as if they  had  been  recently 
revealed remnants of domiciles of a frightful and oversized race of beings no 
longer known to earth.
 I went closer to see the writing on the bottom part of its frame.  "Cthulhu" 
it  read,  simply,  but  this  simple word instilled in me  a  fear  I  would 
previously have considered myself incapable of feeling.  What had happened to 
me?  What had happened to the ever-present rationalisations with which I used 
to drive other people out of their minds with irritation?
 It  was then that I saw the diary.  It lay on the desk,  covered with  dust, 
with an inkpot next to it. A quill stuck in the ink pot but the ink had dried 
to a thick crust,  locking the writing utensil. Why hadn't the writer put the 
lid back on the inkpot?
 I  must have stared at the diary,  thinking of its implications,  for a  few 
minutes  before I finally stretched out a hand to take it.  I blew  the  dust 
off,  revealing  the  initials  "H.P.L." Who  was  this  mysterious  previous 
occupant? The old woman they had mentioned?
 I  opened  the book.  I had expected a leathery croak,  but still  the  only 
sounds  I  heard  were those I assumed came from  the  cellar.  The  cat  had 
developed an odd affection for my leg,  rubbing against it. It seemed totally 
unaware of having scratched me mere minutes before.
 I  turned  pages  to the end.  The handwriting  was  meticulously  executed, 
densely written.  It was a bit archaic, using a complex vocabulary. I arrived 
at the last page that was written on.  March 15th 1937.  The diary must  have 
been of someone - judging by the handwriting probably a man - who lived  here 
prior to the old woman, or maybe even before that. Why had the room been left 
intact, untouched since as far back as 1937?
 A  felt a strange morbidity take over me as I read what might have been  the 
man's last writings.

 "I  feel death tugging at me.  Things are getting out of control.  Should  I 
notify  the authorities of...even now,  I can't get myself to write down  the 
words.  Is  the ancient Mythos true after all?  And why do the cats act  thus 
strangely? Yesterday night I heard the noises intensify, but now they make it 
almost  completely impossible for me to think.  There are scratchings at  the 
door. What creature stands there? Is it"

 At that instant the man must have been distracted,  or startled mortally  by 
something.  Attached to the final "t" was a long scratch,  then nothing.  Had 
these words been his *very last*?  If so,  who - or *what* - had put back the 
quill in the inkpot?  I leafed through the diary,  reading some further parts 
that  were  all  but  horrible.  Then to the  first  page...there  was  name. 
Howard...
 Below,  whatever  was there didn't go through great lengths  disguising  its 
sounds.  I was certain I heard steps,  but they were soft, as if made by bare 
feet.  Or furry claws. My imagination was getting the better of me, but those 
sounds were real.
 Any  moment,  somehow,  I expected scratchings at the door like the man  had 
described in his last moments.  This place was too much. Or perhaps there was 
a  logical  explanation that I would discover in the morning?  That  was  it, 
probably.  I had merely got what I had catered for - a house that inspired me 
to write horror stories.
 Behind  me there was a bookcase containing various tomes.  Like  the  diary, 
they  were  covered with dust.  It was obvious that this room had  been  left 
untouched completely,  almost reveredly so. The books seemed to cover various 
arcane and occult topics.  There was a book about Satanism, even. Had the man 
been a Satan Worshipper or had he perhaps, like me, just bought the books for 
research purposes,  him being a writer perhaps?  My breath stuck in my throat 
as  I saw among the books a leather-bound copy of the book of the  Mad  Arab, 
"Necronomicon".  An intricately shaped pentagram was engraved on it,  in  the 
colour of silver. I felt strangely elated but horrified too. I had rented the 
house  previously owned by a person that had The Dread Book!  No wonder  that 
this   house   seemed   to   attract   its   particularities.   My   previous 
rationalisations suddenly seeming trivial.  Perhaps there was truly something 
going on in,  or around,  this house.  Suddenly, I remember the clerk's sigh, 
the weirdness of there being no sound when I had stood outside, surveying the 
house. The total lack of people around this place.
 I left the room,  cursing at myself for superstitiously scanning the hallway 
to  my  bedroom  for strange  appearances.  The  sounds  continued  unabated, 
crawling up the stairs as if alive. I found myself dashing to the bedroom and 
slamming the door behind me. I didn't heed the cat's scratchings at the door, 
frantic  almost,  that progressed until the morning when I awoke  from  about 
half  a dozen short sleeps that had each been haunted by strange  noises  and 
even stranger voices coming from my cellar.
 When  the  pale  suns truck my face,  waking me  for  the  final  time,  the 
scratching had ceased.
 After  refreshing myself I left the bedroom.  The hallway  seemed  perfectly 
normal now. Had I closed the mysterious room or had it somehow closed itself? 
I couldn't remember, but it was closed nonetheless.
 The  cat was nowhere to be seen,  and there wasn't a sound,  not even  those 
that could penetrate from the outside.  I descended the stairs,  listening to 
their  familiar  woody  noises.  After making myself some  breakfast  -  it's 
strange how a bite to eat can change your outlook on a past night's events  - 
I fetched a large bag and went down into the cellar to clean up.
 When  I switched the light a hammer of fright struck up and down  my  spine, 
making my ears ring quite literally.  On the floor lay the cat that had  been 
alive but few hours before.  Its limbs were extended and nailed to the floor, 
its  entrails spilling from a gash in its abdomen.  It hadn't been done by  a 
knife, I could see. The edges of the wound were far too rough, too uneven. It 
must  have been fangs.  The cat had been dead for hours,  obviously.  It  was 
already going mouldy, ants and flies having been at it longer than an hour at 
least.
 A shiver ran through my entire being.  What had made those scratching noises 
at my door up to the early morning dusk?
 Struck by paranoia, I looked behind me. There was nothing save the stairs. I 
took  my  hand from the light switch,  where it had remained as if  glued  of 
paralyzed.
 I  bolted  up  the stairs.  There was something  ghastly  about  the  house, 
definitely.  I could easily have imaged the sounds or the whole mystery  room 
for  that matter;  I could have had a nightmare or something.  But now I  was 
wide awake and certainly I had not just imaged the dead cat, horribly cut up, 
or half-eaten, or whatever.
 What  to do?  Go back to the real estate agent's and claim my money back  on 
claims  of there being something horrible in the house?  They would  have  me 
fetched  by the men in white coats.  One card short of a full deck,  lost  my 
marbles,  that kind of thing.  No, I would solve all of this myself. I was an 
adult,  I  was up to it.  There was probably a very logical explanation  that 
would render all superstitions and weird thoughts futile.

 I spent most of the day preparing myself for the night. I did not have a gun 
but I had found a crowbar in a shack in the garden.  Whatever it was that ate 
cats at night, I would surely be able to handle it. I took a short nap in the 
afternoon so it wouldn't be too hard to stay awake the whole night.
 The nap took longer than I had intended.  It was already darkening  outside, 
and there was wind tugging at the ancient walls and roof.  It rained  softly, 
but  there wasn't a doubt in my mind that the rain would get  heavier  during 
the night. There were a few lightning flashes outside, but the thunder itself 
was too far to reach me - yet.
 I  pulled on my sturdiest set of trousers,  the working trousers that I  had 
done  some  fruitpicking  labour in,  last summer  somewhere.  I  hefted  the 
crowbar, tapping it on the palm of my other hand.
 I didn't light a candle when I went down.  The darkness was almost  complete 
now,  and the sounds were already occurring again. There was no moon outside, 
and  had  there been any I doubt if it would have been full.  I  knew  I  had 
resolved  to get whatever was in my house in the very cellar,  but  my  knees 
felt weak as I touched the cellar door's knob.  It was cold, like that of the 
mysterious room the other night.
 "What the hell," I thought to myself, "I had better get it over with."
 I threw open the cellar door,  feeling like a hero for an instant. There was 
no  applause,  however,  which tore me back to reality.  The sounds were  not 
actually  deafening,  but already they were beyond the  comfortably  audible, 
distorting slightly.
 I could see nothing but darkness in which I fancied shadows moving. I put my 
hand on the light switch,  at which moment there was an angrily hissing noise 
coming from the far side of the cellar, where the half dozen dead cats lay. I 
could  have  sworn  there was a munching sound,  but it ceased  at  the  very 
instant  I flicked the switch.  There was no light though.  One moment  later 
something  was thrown through the cellar - I caught a very brief  glimpse  of 
something  metallic in a ray of light that was emitted  from  somewhere.  The 
next instant I felt it crashing at my feet.
 The light bulb. Whatever was with me in this cellar, had some sentience. The 
thought  of  an intelligent monster scared me witless.  As if *it*  had  some 
immaculate sense of drama, it chose this moment to reveal to me two bloodshot 
eyes at about 10 feet distance from me. I froze to the spot, suddenly finding 
the cellar very warm.  I felt my forehead suddenly moist,  and as I regripped 
the crowbar I felt the perspiration in my hands making it slightly  slippery. 
I swung the bar,  but the creature's eyes didn't even blink. It was still too 
far off for it to be hit by me, but already it was far too close to my taste.
 I got a strange urge to start yelling at the beast,  cursing, hollering, but 
thought better of it. People did that in cheap horror B films. This was class 
A reality, as bad as it ever gets.
 The beast closed its eyes. I heard a faint hint of a shuffle, then it opened 
its eyes again.  A bit closer.  It was homing in on me.  I saw before me  the 
morning's slaughter,  the cat, its guts spilled on the floor, the odd lack of 
blood. Lack of blood? I had never really liked cats but I didn't want to suck 
them dry either.  Outside I heard a rolling sound of thunder that belonged to 
a flash of lightning I hadn't seen.
 I  turned around and ran up the stairs.  This seemed exactly the moment  the 
beast,  animal,  monster,  abdomination,  had  been waiting for.  I  felt  is 
speaking in my head.  It spoke in vivid images,  black and red all over.  Its 
tongue I did now know, but it mustz have been a universal language dormant in 
all living beings.  I knew it was speaking of death,  impending death.  And I 
was the one going to be it.
 All of this had taken an instant, a precious instant, in which my run up the 
stairs had slowed down. It had been sufficient for the horribly vile creature 
to gain on me and grab an ankle.  Mortal dread hurled itself over me,  and  I 
think I cried in panic,  begging for someone,  someone,  please,  someone, to 
help me.  But I knew there would be nobody to hear.  There was a thunderstorm 
outside, and nobody liked to go here anyway.
 Frantically I kicked.  When the grip loosened and I got to run up  again,  I 
couldn't get rid of the impression that I had escaped only because it  wanted 
me to.  It wanted to play with me,  not just kill me,  eat me, do whatever it 
wanted with me. It seemed pointless the slam the cellar door behind me, but I 
did so anyway.
 As  I  retreated in the ground floor hallway,  towards  the  front  door,  I 
rediscovered the crowbar in my hand.  Why hadn't I used it on the beast?  Had 
it  had some psychological hold on me?  I heard the sound  of  feet,  *clawed 
furry fangs*,  on the cellar stairs.  My eyes opened wide, but I suppressed a 
cry of fear. I could handle this. I hefted the crowbar again. I was an adult. 
I could handle this, sure I could. There was some fumbled at the cellar door, 
after which it opened slowly.  Its hinges made no noise whatsoever.  Then the 
eyes  came,  amid  a silhouette humpy and horrible,  with limbs  where  there 
shouldn't  be any.  And fangs.  There was some light,  from  somewhere,  that 
caught the fangs, long and white-yellowish, dripping with saliva.
 For a moment it seemed as if the house rode the lightning. Horribly explicit 
the  beast became as it crawled forth from the cellar door opening.  I  fell, 
the way dumb women in films fall,  cursing at my own stupidity. I clung on to 
the crowbar as if it was my life insurance.  I *was*.  Not a good one, but it 
was all I had.
 "Come on," I said, trying to sound threatening but probably failing. I could 
have  sworn  the  monster  grinned  as it  poised  itself  to  leap,  like  a 
grotesquely misformed, many-limbed large cat. I clambered back, eye to horrid 
eye  with certain death.  It spoke to me again,  spoke of charred  flesh  and 
blood  pouring  from  wounds  shaped  like  serrated  edges,   fangs,  white, 
yellowish, dripping.
 There was a violent knocking behind me, suddenly, and I could have sworn the 
beast's grin widened. I cried in dismay, causing the knocking, the *slamming* 
on  the front door,  to increase.  The monster must have warned a  previously 
invisible  partner  outside.  I was cornered.  Why had I not thought  of  the 
possibility?  Monsters  came individually in class B horror films.  This  was 
class A reality. Here they came in twos. At least.
 I  yanked open the front door,  at the precise instant of which a  flash  of 
lightning  almost  directly atop my flashed  mercilessly,  the  sound  coming 
within the same moment,  obliterating my hearing. I had my back to the cellar 
creature,  and now faced a squat threat, appearing hideously misformed in the 
bolt  of  lightning  as it sped through the sky.  I  swung  the  crowbar.  It 
impacted  something hard that gave way.  I swung  again,  hacked,  until  the 
wretched creature fell down,  and then I hit some more until the crowbar came 
back gleaming red with bits of hair clinging to it.
 Something laughed behind me,  the disturbed,  loud laugh of the irredeemably 
insane.  I swirled around,  where one more lightning flash revealed to me the 
form of the impure creature as it retreated down to the cellar,  like it  had 
successfully performed its task.
 I looked down on the dead shape lying on my doorstep. The rain lashed at its 
remains.  As  the throes of half-madness left me be,  I recognized in it  the 
clerk  that  had arranged this house for me.  Why had he come  here  at  this 
ungodly hour?  Why? Why had the vile creature downstairs projected in my mind 
visions of an evil accomplice, of death upon me instantly?
 I sank to my knees,  no longer able to suppress my sobbing.  In the  morning 
men came to take my numb self away.

 Maybe I should never have opened the maddeningly explicit diary after I  had 
read  its  former owner's name.  Maybe I should simply have  left,  never  to 
return,  when  I discovered I had moved into a house previously  occupied  by 
Howard  Phillips Lovecraft,  a house that no doubt gave birth to many of  his 
horror stories.
 But now it's too late.

 Written during a few sessions in early summer,  finished July 23rd  1994.  I 
think the Lovecraft inspiration is pretty obvious...


= SOON COMING ===============================================================


 The next issue of "Twilight World",  Volume 2 Issue 6, is to be released mid 
November this year.  Please refer to the 'subscription' section,  below,  for 
details about automatically getting it in case you're interested.
 Please  refer to the section on 'submitting',  below,  for more  details  on 
submitting your own material.
 The next issue will probably contain the following items...

 INTERGALACTIC SEX FANTASY
 by Bryan Kennerley

 NEBULUS
 by Richard Karsmakers

 FIRE & BRIMSTONE
 by Richard Karsmakers

 TORVAK THE WARRIOR
 by Stefan Posthuma

 AND MORE


= SOME GENERAL REMARKS ======================================================


 DESCRIPTION

 "Twilight World" is an on-line magazine aimed at everybody who is interested 
in any sort of fiction - although it usually tends to concentrate on fantasy-
and science-fiction.
 One of its sources is an Atari ST/TT/Falcon disk magazine by the name of "ST 
NEWS" which publishes computer-related articles as well as fiction. "Twilight 
World" principally consists of the best fiction featured in "ST NEWS" so far, 
with added stories submitted by dedicated "Twilight World" readers.

 SUBMISSIONS

 If you've written some good fiction and you wouldn't mind it being published 
world-wide,  you can mail it to me either electronically or by standard mail. 
At all times do I reserve the right not to publish submissions.  Do note that 
submissions  on  disk  will have to use the  MS-DOS/Atari  ST/TT/Falcon  disk 
format on 3.5" Double-or High-Density floppy disk.  Provided sufficient  IRCs 
are  supplied  (see below),  you will get your disk back with  the  issue  of 
"Twilight World" on it that features your fiction. Electronic submittees will 
get an electronic subscription automatically.
 At all times, please submit straight ASCII texts without any special control 
codes whatsoever, nor right justify or ASCII characters above 128. Please use 
*asterisks* to emphasise text if needed, start each paragraph with one space, 
don't include empty lines between each paragraph and use "-" instead of "--". 
Also remember the difference between possessives and contractions,  only  use 
multiple  question marks when absolutely necessary (!!) and never  use  other 
than one (.) or three (...) periods in sequence.

 COPYRIGHT

 Unless  specified along with the individual stories,  all  "Twilight  World" 
stories are copyrighted by the individual authors but may be spread wholly or 
separately  to  any  place - and indeed into any other  magazine  -  provided 
credit is given both to the original author and "Twilight World".

 CORRESPONDENCE ADDRESS

 I prefer electronic correspondence,  but regular stuff (such as  postcards!) 
can  be sent to my regular address.  If you expect a reply please supply  one 
International Reply Coupon (available at your post office), *two* if you live 
outside Europe.  If you want your disk(s) returned, add 2 International Reply 
Coupons per disk (and one extra if you live outside  Europe).  Correspondence 
failing these guidelines will be read (and perused) but not replied to.
 The address (valid at least up to summer 1995):

 Richard Karsmakers
 Looplantsoen 50
 NL-3523 GV Utrecht
 The Netherlands
 Email r.c.karsmakers@stud.let.ruu.nl

 SUBSCRIPTIONS

 Subscriptions  (electronic ones only!) can be requested by sending email  to 
the  address mentioned above.  "Twilight World" is only available  as  ASCII. 
Subscription terminations should be directed to the same address.
 About  one  week prior to each current issue being sent out you will  get  a 
message to check if your email address is still valid.  If a message bounces, 
your subscription terminates.
 Back  issues of "Twilight World" may be FTP'd  from  atari.archive.umich.edu 
and etext.archive.umich.edu.  It is also posted to rec.arts.prose,  alt.zines 
and  alt.prose  and is on Gopher somewhere as well.  Thanks to Gard  for  all 
this!

 PHILANTROPY

 If  you like "Twilight World",  a spontaneous burst of philantropy aimed  at 
the  postal address mentioned above would be very  much  appreciated!  Please 
send cash only;  any regular currency will do.  Apart from keeping  "Twilight 
World" happily afloat,  it will also help me to keep my head above water as a 
student  of  English at Utrecht University.  If  donations  reach  sufficient 
height  they will secure the existence of "Twilight World" after  my  studies 
have been concluded. If not...then all I can do is hope for the best.
 Thanks!

 DISCLAIMER

 All authors are responsible for the views they express. Also, The individual 
authors are the ones you should sue in case of copyright infringements!

 OTHER ON-LINE MAGAZINES

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 EOF

From r.c.karsmakers@stud.let.ruu.nl  Ukn Oct 13 12:38:36 1994
Return-Path: <r.c.karsmakers@stud.let.ruu.nl>
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To: GardEggesboe.Abrahamsen@mrih.no
Subject: Re: Thanks...
Status: RO
X-Status: 

In Message Thu, 13 Oct 1994 10:34:21 +0200 (METDST),
  Gard Eggesboe Abrahamsen <GardEggesboe.Abrahamsen@mrih.no> writes:

>>  Speaking of Wyatt Earp...have you already mailed those two TW issues?
>               ^^^^^^^^^^                                     ^^^^^^^^^
>
>I don't see the connection. Wyatt Earp is, after all, a true story.
>American history. TW is fiction...
 It was a joke, Gard, a j-o-k-e.
>  But no... the problems have not cleared up, and I've had very little
>time lately (project work), but the work's supposed to be finished today,
>so later today I might have time to look at it and fix it up and stuff...
 Actually, I've included an improved version of TW 2.5 somewhere attached to
this message. Please make sure this one replaces any copies you've sent or
FTP'd, and also massmail this new one please.
>
>Gard Eggesboe Abrahamsen  |||   Phone: (+47) 7015 5497       These are my own
>PO Box 5061, Larsgaarden  |||   Gard.Abrahamsen@mrih.no     views and not the
>6021 Aalesund, Norway    / | \  gopher samson.mrih.no 24892     ones of MRIH.


    /////////
  (/  0 o 0  \)
   \    O    /
=-=ooo=-=-=ooo=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Richard Karsmakers                          "Thank God I'm an atheist."
 r.c.Karsmakers@stud.let.ruu.nl                      Anon (in the gutter)
 Editor of "Twilight World" on-line fiction magazine
 Snailmail:     Shetlands 36
                NL-3524 ED  Utrecht
                The Netherlands
          Oooo  Voice: +31-(0)30-886879 (All valid to mid '95 at least)
=-=.oooO=-(  )=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
   (   )  ) /
    \ (  (_/
     \_)











                         T W I L I G H T   W O R L D




                              Volume 2 Issue 5

                             September 10th 1994









 This magazine may be archived,  reproduced and/or distributed provided  that 
no  additions  or changes are made to it.  All stories in this  magazine  are 
fiction.  No  actual  persons  are  designated  by  name  or  character.  Any 
similarity is purely coincidental.
 If you bought this magazine through an expensive PD library,  get it cheaper 
somewhere  else next time because it's for free and not intended for  someone 
else to make money with.
 Please  refer  to  the  end  file  for  information  regarding  submissions, 
subscriptions, donations, copyright, etc.


= LIST OF CONTENTS ==========================================================


 EDITORIAL
 by Richard Karsmakers

 THE TROLL
 by Stefan Posthuma

 A PREHISTORIC TALE
 by Richard Karsmakers

 WADDAYA KNOW, JOE?
 by Mark Knapp

 OH YEAH
 by Stefan Posthuma and Richard Karsmakers

 WIRED
 by Niklas Pivic

 HOWARD'S END, OR, THE BEAST IN THE CELLAR
 by Richard Karsmakers


= EDITORIAL =================================================================
 by Richard Karsmakers


 The  summer is behind us.  Here it was hot,  though it might have been  cold 
where you were.  No matter what kind of weather was,  is,  or may be, this is 
the new issue of "Twilight World" and I hope you'll all like it.
 Thanks to you for the massive amount of literally *zero* people who  reacted 
to my request put in the previous issue's "Editorial". Because of this dismal 
failure I would like to put the request to you once again.

 Request:  I  am trying to establish how many people read  "Twilight  World". 
You'd do me a big favour if you'd send a postcard to my regular mail  address 
(see  end of file) with "Volume 2 Issue 5" and your email address written  on 
it. Cheers!

 Let's hope that I get plenty of reactions this time.


 Richard Karsmakers
 (Editor)

P.S. If you no longer want to receive "Twilight World",  *please* unsubscribe 
     and  don't  let  me wait for the messages  to  bounce  instead,  totally 
     flooding my email box! This especially goes for America OnLine people.


= THE TROLL =================================================================
 by Stefan Posthuma


 Written in an urge of inspiration. As usual, the end sucks (and won't mean a 
lot to people that aren't from the Netherlands).

 "Hungry", the troll growled quite stupidly.
 Cronos was a bit suprised by the enormous stupidity of the immense  creature 
standing  before him.  He had seen many creatures but the one now eyeing  him 
with considerable interest was certainly the most unintelligent of them  all. 
Somewhere in the back of his mind dawned the fact that he himself wasn't  one 
of the most brilliant ones either, but he felt strangely smart in the company 
of this troll.
 It slowly came to the conclusion that Cronos was in fact alive, and thus had 
to  be  killed because his mother always said that he could  and  should  eat 
everything that lived.  It decided that it would hit the quite edible-looking 
human on the head, then eat it. So it did.
 Cronos  was taken aback by the agility of the huge creature as  an  enormous 
fist hit him on the head. Slight feelings of confusion and pain troubled him. 
He decided the time had come for some defensive actions.
 The troll was surprised.  Normally,  its victims would totally disintegrate, 
explode  or at least die when it hit them on the  head.  This  one,  however, 
remained on its feet. Even more surprising, it hit back quite hard.
 Now it was Cronos' turn to be surprised. He had just applied a move that old 
Ninja  master  Hang Foy Soozooki taught him,  designed purely  to  obliterate 
completely any bone structure present in any living creature.  Normally, this 
move would surely kill his victims or at least render them incapable of being 
any threat to his precious hearing aid.  But this troll didn't seem to  react 
to it. It just looked a bit more stupid than it had done before.
 The  silence  that  followed  was a painful  one.  The  two  opponents  were 
pondering  over their next moves,  not very sure of what it would be  because 
their first moves had always been sufficient until now.  The troll decided to 
repeat the last move since it was the only one it knew.  Cronos was  prepared 
now  and evaded the blow.  The troll had put considerable more force into  it 
this time and not hitting Cronos severely upset its balance, causing its fist 
to impact on the left tunnel wall, creating a large hole in it. The troll was 
getting upset now because the tunnel was part of his home.  His mother always 
said he should keep his home nice and tidy.
 "Angry!",  bellowed  the  troll and fetched a piece of tree trunk  that  had 
functioned  as  a support for the tunnel.  Cronos tried another  one  of  his 
techniques on the troll,  resulting in an even more angry tree-trunk wielding 
creature.
 The troll swung the trunk in the direction of Cronos who quickly ducked  and 
applied a double leg lock on the ravenous creature. He slightly misjudged the 
momentum  of  the trunk;  the following chaos resulted in three  more  trunks 
being  torn from their positions,  not giving the tunnel anything to lean  on 
anymore.  The  tunnel,  after  having been lived in for  centuries  by  whole 
generations  of trolls,  decided that its time had come and  collapsed  quite 
dramatically.
 Cronos  felt a slight pressure on his chest as several feet of  rubble  were 
piled upon him.  Heavy breathing beside him reminded him of a very aggressive 
troll  and seconds later he was standing next to a partly collapsed  hill  in 
which he had only wanted to spend the night after fruitlessly searching for a 
certain  renegade  general.  The  fact that the whole country  had  now  been 
reduced to a pile of rubble and total anarchy ruled didn't seem to bother him 
at  all.  Back  in his mind lingered some sort of uncle  but  the  connection 
wasn't  really clear.  Anyway,  the troll was now busy removing  the  various 
chunks of hill from itself. It probably meant having to fight again.
 The troll wasn't happy.  His mother had always stressed that he should  keep 
his  home  tidy  and eat any strangers.  Now he  had  failed  her.  Years  of 
frustration finally came to the surface.  It started to cry.  First it was  a 
bit surprised by the water coming from its eyes,  but when he got the hang of 
it, tears came by the gallons.
 Cronos was a tough fighter. He had survived many battles on many planets and 
still  managed to keep his no-claim on his life  insurance.  Somehow,  crying 
always seemed to affect him.  No matter what cried,  gorgeous young female or 
ugly  troll,  the  one  piece  of his mind  he  had  always  kept  suppressed 
manifested  itself.  After a few moments his eyes started to fill with  water 
and after a few more moments,  he was standing besides the troll, sobbing his 
heart out.
 Suddenly,  Cronos  got an idea.  He started to rummage through  his  pockets 
frantically,  finally  to come up with a small coin he held in front  of  the 
troll enthusiastically. It beheld it with large, ignorant and watery eyes.
 "Even  Apeldoorn  bellen,"  Cronos  said  and  rushed  off  to  the  nearest 
phone booth.

 Written late 1989 or early 1990. Rehashed slightly, September 1994.


= A PREHISTORIC TALE ========================================================
 by Richard Karsmakers

  
 When he regained consciousness, the Timetraveller shook his head and moaned. 
He immediately felt a mindsmashing headache, throbbing through his head as if 
it wanted the very bones of his skull to burst at every single heart's  beat. 
He once more swore never ever to do it again.
 As his senses focused on the sights and sounds around him,  he noticed  that 
he  was indeed teleported (and even warped) to the era he was supposed to  be 
teleported (and indeed warped) to:  The Jurassic era,  a massive 150  million 
years ago -  there were ferns as high as three-storey flats, and all kinds of 
flowers  that  were to die out at the end of the  Cretaceous  era,  about  65 
million years ago.
 So   this   was  where  the   Interstellar   Palaeobiological   Regeneration 
Associations wanted him to work for some time to come.
 The Timetraveller shook his head again, and blinked his eyes.
 There  was  also  a rather enormous specimen  of  extinct  reptile  standing 
directly  in  front of him,  but this he did not notice until it  opened  its 
fangs  and the sun reflected on some terrifying rows of flashy white teeth  - 
with spots of bloody red on them as well,  so the Timetraveller was  somewhat 
startled to notice.
 A  large  piece of dripping wet meat - presumably its tongue -  was  licking 
them in what could only be described as quite a menacing way.
 The  Timetraveller was about to swear that he would never do it  again  when 
the rather enormous specimen of extinct reptile (further to be referred to as 
'Allosaurus') decided it had seen enough of this pathetic human and knew only 
one way to rid itself of such a minor irritation: Eating it.
 A  rather tasteless word that had something to do with used food passed  the 
Timetraveller's  lips  as he noticed the obviously foul intent of  the  giant 
reptile.
 The  Timetraveller  immediately grasped that it was of no avail to  try  and 
convince  Mr.  Hungry  Allosaurus of the disgusting taste of  his  flesh.  He 
pushed a couple of buttons on his portable time machine.
 "See  you  in ten minutes' time!" he said before pressing  a  purple  button 
labelled 'red'.

 Ten minutes later.

 The  Timetraveller noticed that his headache had virtually vanished when  he 
opened  his  eyes  again,  a mere second after  pressing  the  purple  button 
labelled 'red'.
 He saw the world what it looked like 150 million years minus 10 minutes ago, 
and had to admit that it hadn't particularly improved much to his liking.
 But,  just  like  he had hoped,  the enormous specimen  of  extinct  reptile 
(sometimes  also referred to as 'Allosaurus') had decided not to  think  long 
about the mysterious vanishing that had just taken place and had wandered off 
again.
 A  positively deafening sound of what could not be interpreted for  anything 
else  rather  than  some mega-amplified and  giga-boosted  earthquake  sounds 
roared  through the trees,  and Cronos' attention was instantly drawn  to  an 
enormous  specimen  of  extinct  reptile  (sometimes  also  referred  to   as 
'Allosaurus') that was experiencing some quite violent spasms behind a couple 
of  ferns.  It  was  balancing at the edge of a gap in the  ground  that  had 
definitely not been there a mere 10 minutes ago.
 And it was getting bigger as mere more seconds passed.  He blinked his  eyes 
in disbelief. Was his job that urgent?
 The somewhat outdated specimen of extinct reptile (which is indeed sometimes 
also  referred  to as 'Allosaurus') disappeared into  the  gap,  making  some 
awesome sounds of terror.
 The sound of the mega-amplified and giga-boosted earthquake all of a  sudden 
ceased, and the Timetraveller was even more than a bit shocked to notice that 
the Allosaurus had truly vanished (and indeed died).
 Holy macaroni!
 The  seismic activity in this region was surely not to be fooled with -  the 
guys at the Interstellar Palaeobiological Regeneration Association were  just 
in  the nick of time to send him over to teleport these dinosaurs to a  safer 
place.  And if he didn't do something *really* soon,  the dinosaurs would all 
die out...even before these giant animals would have had the decency to  take 
care  of  some more or less intelligent mammalian offspring  from  which  men 
would eventually evolve!
 He felt his strength already growing slightly weaker...

 Written December 1989.


= WADDAYA KNOW, JOE? ========================================================
 by Mark Knapp


 The  man  rolled  over with a grunt.  Clutching  at  her  pillow,  he  half-
consciously realized his wife had already left for work.
 After  using the bathroom and opening the shades,  he headed  downstairs.  A 
quick  breakfast of cinnamon toast and orange juice went down  without  being 
noticed.
 Remembering his schedule, he called a number from memory.
 "Quentin and Associates," the receptionist said.
 "Greg Quentin, please. Tell him this is Joe Brunswick."
 "One moment, sir."
 "Sir, Mr Quentin has no knowledge of a Mr Brunswick. You did say Brunswick?"
 "Yes,  that's right," the man answered,  feeling perplexed and not a  little 
bit  exasperated.  "Never  mind,  I'll call back when he's had  time  to  get 
organized."
 Joe hung up. Going out to get the paper to take his mind off this weirdness, 
he  patted his Weimeraner,  Bully.  The news was made up of the usual  random 
observations of untrained bystanders. Turning to the unpaid bills left on the 
counter,  he briefly scanned the gas bill,  phone bill,  electric...all high, 
but that wasn't unusual.
 Wait a minute,  he thought.  The bills were addressed to Frank Salmson.  Did 
the mailman get mixed up?  No,  it was the right address.  Very  strange.  Ah 
well,  someone got the address wrong.  Climbing the back stairs to the second 
floor,  he  tripped  over  his  daughter's  jacket;  then,  farther  up,  her 
schoolbooks.  "Kiddo," he called,  "time to get up.  And could you pick  your 
stuff up off the stairs?"
 "OK,  Dad," came the muffled reply.  Of course,  knowing his  daughter,  Joe 
thought,  she'll need to be woken up again in ten minutes.  He went into  the 
master  bedroom,  laid a sportcoat,  tie,  pants,  and yesterday's shirt  (it 
wasn't  all that dirty,  he told himself) on the bed,  and went next door  to 
take a shower.
 When he was done,  he dressed,  woke his daughter up again - making sure she 
was actually out of the bed - and went downstairs.  Joe wrote a short note to 
his  wife,  reminding  her  that he had a meeting  with  the  regional  Pepsi 
representative and so might be a little late.  Bully wanted to play,  so  Joe 
obliged him by throwing the tennis ball in the yard with him.  Then he rubbed 
the big dog's belly, told him to be a good dog, and hopped in his car.
 He almost took the wrong exit for his office,  but finally made it to Folsom 
Street. Off the ramp to the right, into the little court, and into the lot of 
his office.  It felt odd,  but he knew he was in the right place.  Gotta stop 
staying up so late, he told himself. I'm not so young anymore; up til two and 
I'm out of it all day.
 "Hi Cindy," he said as he loped through the door and back to his office, not 
noticing the receptionist's odd stare. She'd only been there three weeks, she 
mused, but he'd never forgotten her name before.
 Sitting  down  at  his desk,  he began to  feel  uneasy.  Someone  had  been 
rummaging through his papers,  he could tell. And, oddly...wait a minute. All 
the  correspondence was addressed to Frank Salmson.  What the hell was  going 
on?
 The  phone  rang,  startling  him.  "John Winters on  line  one,  sir,"  the 
receptionist said.
 He picked up the receiver. "Yeah?"
 "Hey, Frankie, how's it going?"
 "My name's Joe, not Frankie."
 "Yeah,  right.  Listen,  I talked to Marilyn about that plastics option, but 
the percentages were too high. Maybe we should shop it around a little."
 "Ah...sure, sure. See what you can come up with."
 "Right. See ya round, Frank."
 This  was  very weird.  He rubbed his temples,  wondering if he'd  been  out 
drinking last night.  Deciding he did feel a little out of it,  he called  to 
the receptionist. "Hey, Cindy, could you come in here?"
 "What can I get you," she said when she entered a moment later.
 "Nothing,  thanks.  I  just think I need to get away from work for a  while. 
It's been a long week.  Could you hold down the fort,  tell anyone  important 
I'll  call them tomorrow?  And,  if you want,  go ahead and cut out a  little 
early yourself. Say, around three."
 "Sure,  Mr.  Salmson.  I didn't want to say anything,  but you do look a bit 
piqued."
 "Uh...yeah. Thanks; I'll see you tomorrow."
 Hurrying to his car,  he wondered just what it was that he'd been  drinking. 
Was  he hearing wrong when she called him Salmson?  Or was someone pulling  a 
complicated practical joke?  He tried to think if he knew anyone who would do 
something this bizarre, but couldn't come up with anyone. Oh, well, some good 
food and an afternoon at the movies would take his mind off things.
 He caught two matinees at the multiplex theater built where wheatfields  had 
been  when he was a teenager.  By five thirty the day was all but  forgotten. 
The  growling in his stomach urged him to head home.  When he got  there,  an 
unfamiliar car was parked in the street outside.  Inside,  though,  he  found 
only his wife,  his daughter,  and the massive dog.  The car must have been a 
neighbour's new showpiece.
 "Hi honey. Hungry?" his wife said.
 "Boy, am I. And beat, too. Mind if I collapse on the couch?"
 "No, go ahead. Dinner's almost ready."
 He picked up the remote and flipped channels until he found the local  news. 
Raising his voice over the TV and the noises from the kitchen,  he called out 
"How was work?"
 "Well,  the new wing is almost done,  so it looks like I'll be staying  late 
the next few weeks moving the periodicals into it."
 "Bummer. Say, hon, there's some mail on the bookshelf that got misdelivered. 
Do you recognize it?"
 His  wife  leaned around the corner and glanced at the  letters.  "It's  the 
right address, hon."
 "No, I mean the name." She walked out this time, and picked up the pile.
 "Marion Salmson...Frank...Salmson family...hmm...no, it all looks right."
 He sat stunned for a moment.  The doubts of the morning crept back into  his 
mind.  "Uh...honey?  This is going to sound weird,  but...are you sure that's 
right?"
 His wife looked at him for a long moment. "Are you OK?"
 "I  don't know,  I really don't know." His wife came over and began  rubbing 
his shoulders.  "Something strange is happening.  I thought at first it might 
be a gag, or maybe some stress-related hallucination, but... listen. All day, 
everyone's  been calling me Frank Salmson.  But...it just isn't my  name.  Or 
doesn't seem like, it anyway. My name's Joe Brunswick. Isn't it?"
 She  looked at him again,  searchingly,  caringly.  "Honey,  you  are  Frank 
Salmson. I swear it. No joking. You haven't been drinking, have you.?"
 "No!  No,  dammit,  I'm completely sober. What the hell is going on here? Is 
everyone going crazy? Or, am I? I just don't understand."
 She came around the couch and sat in his lap. "It's OK, it's going to be OK. 
Maybe  this is some kind of minor nervous breakdown,  but  that's  OK,  we'll 
figure it out.  Don't worry,  I'll be here.  I love you,  you know that much, 
don't you?"
 "Yes...yes,  I know that.  And I love you. I'm just...not exactly sure who I 
am." She kissed his forehead, and he pulled her close.
 "The Channel 8 Six O'Clock News is brought to you by Kupp's Billiard Supply. 
'We give you our best shot.'" "Good evening,  this is Tom Malone standing  in 
for  Scott Stevens,  who's on vacation.  Our lead story tonight is a case  of 
mistaken identity.  Or, make that cases. Jeannie?" "Thanks Tom. That's right. 
Authorities in Lake County have received two hundred and eighteen reports  of 
an unusual sort of amnesia.  The victims,  all male, appear to have forgotten 
their names and those of their loved ones.  However,  the most unusual aspect 
of this psychological syndrome is that they all believe they have new  names. 
In fact,  they all believe they have the same name.  A cause has not yet been 
determined,  however,  food, workplaces, and homes are all being examined for 
possible  contaminants that might have affected the memories of the  victims. 
The  phenomenon was discovered when a man,  after being refused cash  at  his 
bank when he signed the wrong name to a check, began screaming at the tellers 
that  he  was 'Joe Brunswick' and had to be restrained  by  security  guards. 
Jamie Instrom is live at the bank right now. Jamie?" "Thanks, Jeannie. Second 
Fourth bank is on a quiet corner of the Hillside district..."
 The couple stared at each other with wide eyes.
                                                         Col's OH 3/16/93 MEK


= OH YEAH ===================================================================
 by Stefan Posthuma and Richard Karsmakers


 Whistling some kind of tune between his teeth,  the man put the pedal to the 
metal and had his car disappear from the fuel station in a cloud of dust  and 
dead ants.
 Would a camera have been aimed at this fuel station, it would have displayed 
the slow appearance of the somewhat puzzled form of a man in his mid-forties, 
straining to grasp something as the dust settled down around him.  He  wasn't 
puzzled at the enormous amount of dead ants in the car's tracks,  nor was  he 
wondering what the hell he was supposed to do with 9,000 Thanatopian credits. 
He  *was* wondering,  however,  why that dude had just filled up his  Pontiac 
Trans  Am with brown beer.  The thoughts of another person  exactly,  someone 
dressed in white who disappeared moments later.

 "Brown beer?!"
 The shopkeeper had looked at Warchild with an incredulous look in his  eyes, 
fingering  a  half-opened drawer for a weapon of some kind -  for  you  could 
never know.
 "But,  mister,"  the  incredulous-looking  man  had  continued,  "arms's  my 
business,  ya know.  I wouldn't wanna go sellin' booze when people a' wantin' 
arms, ya know. I'd be rippin' me own..."
 Warchild had cut the man short with a pan-universal sign of a finger on  his 
right hand.
 "I WANT BROWN BEER."
 Warchild  had repeated his demand with a kind of particular  'something'  in 
his  voice;  a 'something' that would have neatly fitted on someone like  the 
grim reaper.
 "Mind ya,  mister,  I would be sellin' ya beer if I had any,  ya know. But I 
haven't gottit. It's asimple as tha'".
 He had tried to sound as if he still has confidence in himself,  but he  had 
seemed to fail somewhere. He had almost started to believe that he was lying.
 "I WANT BROWN BEER."
 Though  it had sounded identical to Warchild's previous demand in  even  its 
tiniest aspects, the shopkeeper hadn't quite thought so. And the poor man had 
definitely believed he himself was lying now.
 "Okay,  okay,  mister,"  the  man had said with trembling  voice  and  sweat 
appearing on his forehead,  "I'll be bringin' ya a nice cool beer right away, 
mister! Brown beer, yeah, in a neat li'l bo'l."
 He had turned around and disappeared behind a door labeled "Private".
 Cronos had scanned the shop. Quite some interesting gear had been stacked on 
the shelves,  which would no doubt have enhanced his chances of surviving the 
intricate enemy activities on the fourth tourist world.  Had he wanted to buy 
any  of  them,  he  would have had to pay excessive  amounts  of  Thanatopian 
credits.
 Apart from him,  there had only been one other customer at the shop. Someone 
dressed in white, carefully examining a display of hypodermic syringes.
 After  about two minutes,  the shopkeeper had returned from behind the  door 
labeled  "Private" with what had seemed to look like some kind of  tube  that 
had  looked a bit like some kind of post-modern piece of space-age  weaponry, 
unfortunately aimed at the mercenary annex hired gun.  Warchild had not  been 
pleased. Not at all.
 With  a  rather tricky move,  Warchild had made the shopkeeper sink  on  the 
floor, suddenly weak at the knees and a whole lot of other parts of his body.
 Still,  however,  Cronos hadn't got what he wanted.  Neither had he found it 
when  he had headed back from the Fourth Tourist world to Earth.  So when  he 
visited  the  gas station and found a fridge full of it,  he handed  the  guy 
behind  the counter enough credits to buy the entire gas station -  providing 
Thanatopian  had any more value than monopoly money on this planet.  He  also 
found some gas.
 Since Cronos Warchild was trained to fight, not to think, he absent-mindedly 
put the beer in his car and drank the petrol, much to the amazement of an old 
man who just happened to be sitting in a rocking-chair on the porch, watching 
the  ants fullfilling their daily ritual of slaughtering enormous amounts  of 
other  ants in the eternal Battle of the Scarce  Picnic  Leftovers.  Warchild 
never noticed anything odd,  though he frowned at the unusual foam coming out 
of the nuzzle of his car's gas tank. The beer seemed a bit off too.
 So now he stood there. In the middle of nowhere.
 Maybe,  'nowhere' was actually a bit of an exaggeration,  but it  definitely 
doesn't  fall  into the confinements of this story's  boundaries  to  discuss 
whether  a  thousand square miles of bare desert sand (with a dune  here  and 
there) can be described as 'nowhere' or not.
 The  car  had  seemed to run smoothly for just about as  much  time  as  was 
necessary  to get him PRECISELY in the middle of this thing called  'nowhere' 
and  then had quite spontaneously ceased to operate in an enormous  belch  of 
fumes and a disgusting smell of rancid Brown Beer.
 After he had let the synonym of an animal's solid excrements pass his lips a 
great many times, he decided to get out of his burning excuse for a Pontiac.
 Just  at about that moment,  a guy wearing a small,  dark,  flat hat with  a 
ridiculous small erect thingy on top of it,  holding a bottle of red wine and 
a lengthily shaped loaf of bread, barged onto the scene.
 "Excusez moi?" the strange chap seemed to inquire.
 "? Whatthe.... ?"
 Completely  baffled to an extent Cronos had never before  imagined  possible 
(well,  it  was  universally known that the mercenary annex hired gun  HAD  a 
somewhat limited imagination - hence),  he looked around,  carefully scanning 
the surroundings for someone that might be jamming his newly acquired hearing 
aid.
 He  failed to see anything but enormous loads of sand grains  spread  around 
him on an area which he quickly estimated to be 986.54 square miles in  size. 
That, and the somewhat strange chap, of course.
 "Est'ce que je aider vous?" the strange chap inquired further.
 Warchild was now sure that no one could possibly be jamming his hearing aid. 
That  could  only mean one thing - he was being insulted in  the  rudest  way 
someone from Sucatraps could possibly be. And, with a short shock that lasted 
at  least  several scores of nanoseconds,  he saw that the  lengthily  shaped 
thing the strange chap held under his arm looked pretty much like a tube that 
had been shoved under his nose only recently.
 So he did what he was trained for to do in dangerous situations such as this 
one. Accompanied only by the sound of several millions of air molecules being 
savagely torn from each other,  his fist rocketed through the air,  impacting 
on  the  strange  chap with a rather unhealthy  speed  at  a  proportionately 
unhealthy spot.
 About  a quarter of an hour later,  a deafening 'boom' followed by a  softer 
'thud'  was heard by the gas station owner,  who was now discussing  red  ant 
picnic scavenging war strategics with the old man, after which they looked at 
the  approximate centre of 986.54 square miles of sand grains  with  slightly 
puzzled looks.

 Note:  Please  excuse  the authors of this story for their blatant  lack  of 
French  grammar.   Due  to  circumstances  that  fall  beyond  their  current 
intention  to reveal,  they both flunked this subject at highschool  and  can 
be safely said not to know any better.
 Except  maybe  for "Voulez vous couchez avec moi ce soire" - a  phrase  they 
both use every time they see someone wearing a small,  dark,  flat hat with a 
ridiculous small erect thingy on top of it,  holding a bottle of red wine and 
a  lengthily  shaped  loaf of bread - their French  can  be  considered  non-
existent.

 Cronos decided not to hang around the scene any longer.  The desert vultures 
where  already  noticing a heavily mutilated body in the middle of  all  that 
sand and were displaying a growing rate of interest for it.  Because he hated 
all  birds of prey,  vultures particularly,  he started on a brisk  trot.  He 
savagely  and  unwittingly  splattering some ants who  were  carrying  picnic 
remnants  with triumphant looks on their little faces.  Instead of  to  their 
nests they'd now have to take it to the Eternal Honeyjar.

 Note:  Recent research by reknown biologists has revealed that ants  believe 
the  world  evolves around them and that they spend their afterlives  in  the 
holy and indeed incredibly sweet and plentiful Eternal Honeyjar which  floats 
amidst  the remnants of the Great Picnic at the start of  their  World,  with 
scores  of  decaying  animal  remains nearby to munch on  (or  to  go  to  on 
posthumous honeymoons).
 It  is quite a well-known fact that,  each year,  more people who happen  to 
enjoy  a picnic get shocked by the ritual suicide of enormous hordes of  ants 
who hurl themselves into a honeyjar carelessly left open.

 Warchild  had  strolled briskly through the seemingly endless desert  for  a 
whole  lot of hours when he felt a strangely nauseating feeling in his  neck. 
At  about the same time,  from the shimmering air above the hot load of  sand 
grains came a shape.
 "Do you see those bilds, Sjau Long?" the shape said.
 The  voice wasn't meant to be heard by Warchild.  Instead,  a reaction  came 
from  a second shape that now appeared slowly above the  horizon,  shimmering 
and uncertain.
 "Yes,  honoled  mastel!  What ale they?  Alen't those vultules?" this  other 
shape now replied.
 Some  music  now also sounded across the many millions of billions  of  sand 
grains.  It  sounded like some kind of Oriental folk music,  and  the  lyrics 
seemed to go like this:

 "Blackened is the nonwolthy end
  Wintel it will send
  Thlowing each nonwolthy thing we see
  Into unhonolable obsculity"

 Then,  it  seemed to be cut off abruptly - as if the tape had been  damaged, 
savaged by an event somewhele...eh...somewhere in its owner's past.
 "See what I will do with those vultules,  noble applentice!" the first shape 
now said.  It started to make strange movements, not wholly unlike those made 
by someone dangling at the end of a ten foot rope without any ground support.
 A  shining  piece of metal could be seen,  thrown in the air by  the  shape, 
slicing  the genitals off one of the more eager vultures circling in the  air 
above it.
 The second shape waited several seconds, and then exclaimed:
 "All nice and well,  noble mastel,  I tlust that vultule will nevel have sex 
again, but I guess we will not be having soft vultule feathel filled cushions 
to sleep on tonight either, will we?"
 "I guess we won't," the first shape said.
 Cronos  looked at the shapes in bewildered puzzlement,  and after  loads  of 
long thinking (I suppose you know now how hard this is for him,  since he was 
trained to...well,  you know it by now) a reluctant remembrance shuddered his 
consciousness:  It was Ninja Master Hang Foy Soozooki, the guy who had taught 
him  the  move  that was purely designed to completely  obliterate  any  bone 
structure present in any living creature!
 Staggering,  licking his dried out, crusted lips, he stumbled slowly towards 
Hang Foy Soozooki and his servant annex apprentice, Sjau Long. These were now 
engaged  in a tea ceremony of enormous complexity,  involving the burning  of 
sand grains,  the inserting of precise quantities of honey in tea  mugs,  the 
purging of some dried out leaves in water, and the fencing off of a couple of 
hundred  frantically fanatic ants that seemed to have millions  of  perfectly 
valid reasons to hurl themselves into the Ninja Master's honey jar.
 Needless to say, each and every ant trying to do so was sent back home after 
having been rendered memberless.
 "Moo  Moo Moomoomooo..." Warchild tried to cry in some kind of happy  voice. 
Whilst  trying to cry out the Master's name,  the mercenary annex  hired  gun 
dashed (or, rather, clumsily crawled) forward.
 Neither  Hang  Foy nor Sjau actually seemed to find it necessary  to  notice 
him,  and quietly proceeded burning grains,  inserting honey,  purging leaves 
and performing mass micro-surgery.
 "Water. Please." Cronos said weakly.
 Sjau Long now seemed to notice him.
 "Water?" he looked at Warchild with the same kind of look that had  occupied 
the  face  of  the  mercenary  annex  hired  gun  before  -  one  of  puzzled 
bewilderment, that is.
 "Water. Please." Cronos repeated, even more weakly.
 "Oh! Watel!?", Sjau Long now enthused.
 "Water."
 There was now nothing left in Cronos' voice besides weakness.
 "Watel!"
 The  servant annex apprentice took an enormous jug in which there must  have 
been gallons and gallons of crisp,  clear and cool water. He poured it gently 
over Warchild's dried out-head and crust-covered lips.
 The  fata  morgana disappeared,  and Cronos only felt the harsh  and  bitter 
taste  of a relatively minor quantity of sand grains in his mouth as he  fell 
into the desert, face down.
 It  felt  to him as if someone was pouring down his aching throat  each  and 
every bit of sand to be found in the desert.
 It might be a wise idea, he thought to himself, to faint. So he did.

 The spiralling feeling of plunging into endless voids ceased only then  when 
he  impacted  on something that was quite awkward to impact  on.  Instead  of 
being nastily solid and quite splattering (like,  say,  a circus tent floor), 
it was very soft, and liquidish.
 Cronos  opened his mouth to scream in agony,  only to have it filled with  a 
large amount of the liquid.  It tasted very sweet,  and indeed very familiar, 
but he couldn't quite place it yet.
 Nor could he even pretend to like the fact that this liquid,  no matter  how 
good it tasted,  obstructed his breathing in a rather efficient way.  He also 
didn't like the slow sinking feeling he was experiencing.  He liked to be  in 
control of things, which he now most certainly wasn't.
 Taking  each  and  every  muscle  in his body to  the  very  limits  of  its 
capabilities,  he struggled to stay alive. When he opened his eyes and looked 
through  the thin layer of the thickish fluid on them,  he was  disgusted  to 
notice that a couple of rather large ants were at the verge up jumping in the 
fluid, too.
 Were they really wearing little sandals?
 They  made  a  sound that could not be mistaken  for  anything  else  rather 
than...chanting, really.
 One after the other, the ants started plummeting themselves into the mass of 
soft, sweet, thick fluid; a vortex of many times six huge insect paws.
 There were hundreds of 'em now.  Cronos tried to scream once more. His mouth 
got  filled  with the soft,  sweet fluid as well as several  dozen  ants.  He 
decided against screaming some more and instead just tried to  breathe.  This 
on its own was already hard enough, as his nasal openings were cluttered with 
ants, too.
 "Cronos!  Cronos"  he seemed to hear.  The voice floated like a  mist  would 
float over the endless marshes of Spargoflactic Yllozud.

 Note:  Many  light  years from Earth (or even from Sucatraps),  there  is  a 
planet  called  Spargoflactic  Yllozud.  It is by all  means  quite  a  small 
planetoid,  but  its  marshes  are  of  quite  gigantic  proportions  -  many 
scientists  believe that a freakout in the space/time continuum has  actually 
resulted in them being ENDLESS.
 Not the kind of marsh you would be happily flollopping around in if you were 
called Zem.
 Also not the kind of marsh where you would like to be part of the expedition 
that,  for 37 generations, has been travelling to that 'nice looking patch of 
hill on yonder horizon'.

 As  the  ants absorbed him,  Warchild made some rather  spastic  moves.  And 
suddenly he was floating through a kind of rotating warp tunnel that provided 
his retina with more different colours to absorb and interpret than the black 
eye  of  a  stained Frenchman lying despirited somewhere  in  the  centre  of 
hundreds  of square miles of desert sand.  He felt giddy  with  vertigo,  and 
tried  to grab hold of something.  Unfortunately,  there was nothing to  grab 
hold of.  With what seemed to Warchild like a deafening 'thud',  he landed on 
the floor of what,  after a couple of seconds' examination,  turned out to be 
some kind of bar.
 Lefty  was  behind the bar serving a drink.  The girl sitting  next  to  him 
wasn't extremely pretty,  but she sure had some legs down there. Cronos was a 
bit  surprised  by  all  this,  since nobody  seemed  to  notice  his  sudden 
appearance.  After  a few moments,  a man in some ridiculous white  polyester 
clothes came out of the toilet,  carrying a remote control and a red rose. He 
walked towards the bar and ordered a drink.
 "Hiya," the man said to Cronos.
 "Larry Laffer is the name, you look kinda strange," he said.
 Cronos considered his next move.  The man didn't seem a threat in any way so 
he  quickly discarded the thought of smacking the pathetic  jerk's  face.  He 
*did* notice a foul odour arising from the smooth jerk's mouth.
 "Hey.  Your  mouth  smells like the inside of a motorman's glove,"  a  voice 
said.
 Cronos looked around him in...well...puzzled bewilderment.  Or shall we  say 
'bewildered puzzlement'? Yes. Good idea. Anyway.
 "WHAT WAS THAT?" the mercenary annex hired gun inquired.
 "Oh,  really, that's nothing out of the ordinary," the slick jerk explained, 
"It's  just good ol' Al giving me some advise.  He tends to do that  now  and 
again."  With a slightly embarrassed look,  he produced a small spray  bottle 
from  the  inside  pocket  of his incredibly ill-fitted  suit  and  used  the 
contents on his oral opening.
 "It sure was about time, Larry," the omnipresent voice concluded.
 Warchild looked around him again, instantly reaching for one of his recently 
acquired  killer gadgets.  When he found it,  it turned out to be all  sticky 
with honey or something like that.
 Useless.
 "Cronos! Cronos!" another voice yelled.
 The jerk now also looked around him. That surely wasn't good ol' Al's voice; 
it  was  a voice that would have made the sound of Jessica Rabbit  seem  like 
that of an eighty-year-old-Napalm-Death-crying-grandmother in comparison. Not 
heeding it,  the smooth jerk went off to the toilet,  where Warchild's  super 
hearing  (aid)  noticed him talking to a bozo  about  roses,  and  afterwards 
drowning himself.
 There  was  one  other rather interesting door on the ground  floor  of  the 
establishment.  It looked quite sturdy and there was a small peephole in  it. 
After  walking  towards it,  the mercenary annex hired gun knocked  on  it  - 
accidentally knocking the door completely off its hinges.
 Behind  it,  a  rather fat pimp was watching a sleazy adult movie  ("John  & 
Marsha take a Bath"), who suddenly wore a somewhat frightened expression upon 
beholding the rather square silhouette in the door opening.
 "Er...shouldn't  you  just  say 'Ken sent me' or  something?"  the  fat  man 
ventured in a quite unusually subtle way.
 Warchild  was planning extensive apologies,  but "GRMPF," was all  he  found 
necessary to pronounce.
 "Er...yeah.  Er....if you wanna,  you can go upstairs and...er...  have your 
pipes cleaned...er....if you get my drift..." the pimp continued.
 Cronos'  facial  expression told quite clearly that he didn't  know  nothin' 
about  no  driftin'  - nor did he know anything about  cleanin'  (unless  one 
was talking about toilets in an Ambulor Eight Thai Boxing School).  He walked 
passed the abashed man who was very wise and decided to continue watching the 
sleazy movie.
 "Have a nice lay," the pimp muttered habitually.
 Upon arriving upstairs, Cronos saw a rather tarty girl lying on a small bed. 
She was reading the printout of some kind of on-line fiction magazine and was 
apparently enthralled by the adventures of one of the characters occurring in 
the introductory novella.
 "He  walked towards the bed,  wondering what the rather tarty girl might  be 
reading in such an unusually enthralled way," the girl read aloud to herself, 
"and  he  wandered why she read aloud.  Then the girl looked up and  saw  him 
standing - her squarely built Adonis, her hero of all quests..."
 The girl looked up from her reading to see Cronos standing.  Her eyes opened 
wildly, not entirely grasping the meaning of all that was happening. She read 
the next line of the printout aloud.
 "She  arose  from the bed,  screaming widly  about  male  potency,  enormous 
muscles,  square  build and a desire of fourteen hours of  passionate  sexual 
intercourse."
 Instinctively, the mercenary annex hired gun quickly looked around him. What 
to do now?
 As the girl was getting up from the bed, licking her lips and taking off her 
clothes,  he spotted some pills in the window frame.  He mistook them for the 
explosive  eggs of the Taroglyphoxian killer wale.  He decided to  lurch  for 
them. He made a run for what he considered to be his only means of saving his 
life  without getting dirty hands (and without getting some kind of  somewhat 
transferable  disease).  The momentum of his fear combined with her  passion, 
however, caused him to actually jump clean *through* the window.
 A  rather unattractive garbage container with a rather callous hammer in  it 
was  coming closer to him in a fashion described centuries earlier by  a  guy 
called Isaac.
 He turned around many times,  and suddenly there were colours. Many colours, 
indeed.  Even more colours than those present on the black eyes of a thousand 
million billion Frenchmen lying spread all over many 54 square miles of  sand 
grains.
 He felt giddy with vertigo (as usual), and turned and turned and turned...

 Independence Limited
 Freedom of choice
 Choice is made for you my friend
 Freedom of speech
 Speech is words that they will bend
 Freedom no longer frees you!

 The  song  was sung by a blue-haired creature with a tail and  yellow  eyes, 
circling  along with Warchild in the vortex of vertiguous vehemence.  It  was 
followed by about a dozen religious nuts, complexily floating within the same 
vortex  and yelling sentences which mainly existed of the word  "Blasphemy!". 
These,  in turn,  seemed to be followed by about two dozen large sandals that 
seemed to have been lost in all the nuts' enthusiasm.
 Two  seconds  later (well...give or take a couple  of  nanoseconds),  Cronos 
found  himself back in the enormous honeyjar,  every (EVERY) opening  in  his 
body  filled  with crawling and throbbing ants.  It seemed as  if  they  were 
actually building little ant homes in his organs, and were preparing for many 
posthumous honeymoons.
 "Cronos! Cronos!"
 A voice echoed through his subconscious consciousness as it were. He thought 
he must be dreaming,  for now he even felt clear and cool water being used to 
moisten his cracked lips.
 Dizzy,  he tried to open his eyes. He managed to do this quite well - though 
there was still a thin layer of honey obstructing his sight, at least much of 
it.  There seemed to be someone sitting on top of him,  sweeping ants off his 
face.  Normally,  this  would have resulted in immediate termination  of  the 
creature in question, but this one was different...
 His eyes had trouble in convincing his brains what they beheld.
 A  woman,  wearing a white robe (on the back of which was written in  large, 
red  letters  in  a font normally used  in  cheap  B-movies,  "Ambulor  Eight 
Hospital for the Very,  Very Splattered") was a few inches above him.  As  he 
looked  up,  he could see the loose buttons on her shirt and the  black  lace 
revealing itself teasingly. Her soft roundings were pressed against his chest 
and he could feel her breathing in a very special way.
 She  had  a  very worried expression on her face.  The face  itself  was  so 
perfectly  shaped  that Cronos almost had to avert his eyes to  prevent  them 
from  being  blinded forever.  Her eyes were faintly moist  which  made  them 
glitter as if they were prizeless diamonds catching the rays of the sun above 
which suddenly didn't seem to burn viciously anymore,  but merely  functioned 
as  a device to envelop her in an almost divine light.  When her long  fawnen 
hair  fell  forwards on his face,  he was overcome by a smell  of  blossoming 
roses on a warm summer afternoon in some distant and heavenly  country.  With 
one sweep of her arm,  she brushed aside her hair and continued feeding small 
amounts of water to him.
 "Cronos",  she  whispered  in a voice so clear and so full of  emotion  that 
tears welled up in his eyes, "are you all right?"
 Cronos  swallowed some of the water and decided to stay still for some  more 
time so he could enjoy this with every fibre of his body.
 When she moved to take something from the little bag she was  carrying,  one 
of  the lower buttons on her shirt gave up and the sight revealed  to  Cronos 
was  enough to almost render him senseless again.  Never before had  he  seen 
such finesse,  or such perfect shapes. He decided to get up now before things 
really got out of hand. He didn't have any tissues handy.
 When  he stood up next to her,  swallowing heavily,  he saw that it was  the 
same nurse that had saved his life already once more.  And, so he was pleased 
to note, she still looked like an identical twin of Gloria Estefan.
 "Wooo  wooo," Warchild said,  his voice shaking,  trembling and  flollopping 
with emotions of extensive gratitude.
 "Hush,  hush,"  the  nurse whispered whilst holding one  of  her  delicately 
shaped fingers to his lips,  "don't talk,  beloved.  It brings you naught but 
pain."
 He  felt  kinda insulted by the sheer mentioning of the possibility  of  him 
being able to sense pain, but decided not to act and feign that he was indeed 
in severe pains.  Instinctively, he seemed to know that this was not going to 
be bad for him at all.
 He drew her slowly towards him, repeating his exclamation of gratitude.
 "Wooo wooo."
 "Don't, beloved," the nurse whispered.
 She  thrust her lips towards his,  unable to restrain her passion  and  love 
much longer. She ripped open his black leather jacket and closed her eyes.
 "Oh, Cronos!" she sighed passionately.

 BEEP. BEEP.

 Her lips froze in mid-thrust,  and her hands did likewise as they were about 
to let the heavy leather jacket drop on the desert sand.

 BEEP. BEEP.

 "Damn. Dr. Hamilton wants me at the Hospital," she concluded.
 "? Whatthe...?" Cronos uttered unbelievably.
 Completely  baffled to an extend Cronos had never before  imagined  possible 
(not  even  earlier  that day),  he looked  around,  carefully  scanning  the 
surroundings  for  someone that might be jamming his newly  acquired  hearing 
aid.
  Had  some honey come into this device?  Or were a couple of ants  having  a 
honeymoon gang-bang orgy in there?  Unfortunately for Cronos, nothing had and 
none were.
 "Got to go," the nurse said, adjusting her shirt.
 She  sensually  disappeared  in what seemed like a puff  of  pink  smoke.  A 
commonly  used  synonym for an animal's solid  excrements  passed  Warchild's 
lips.
 At  that precise moment,  an alien landed RIGHT before  him.   Warchild  was 
still busy being baffled with what had happened just now, so he really didn't 
know what to do with this new thing happening to him.
 It alighted gently on the ground,  and what little hum it had generated died 
away,  as  if  lulled by the afternoon calm of many,  many  square  miles  of 
desert.
 A ramp extended itself.
 Light streamed out.
 A tall figure appeared silhouetted in the hatchway.  It walked down the ramp 
and stood in front of Cronos.
 "You're a jerk, Warchild," it said simply.
 It was alien, very alien. It had a peculiar alien tallness, a peculiar alien 
flattened  head,  peculiar  slitty little alien  eyes,  extravagantly  draped 
golden robes with a peculiarly alien collar design, and pale grey-green alien 
skin  which had about it that lustrous sheen which most grey-green faces  can 
only acquire with plenty of exercise and plenty of very expensive soap.
 Cronos boggled at it.
 It gazed levelly at him.
 Cronos'  first  sensation  of  hope  and  trepidation  had  instantly   been 
overwhelmed by astonishment,  and all sorts of thoughts were battling for the 
use of his vocal chords at the moment.
 "Whh...?" he said.
 "Bu...hu...uh..." he added.
 "Ru...ra..wah...who?"  he finally managed to say and lapsed into  a  frantic 
state  of silence.  He was feeling the effect of having not said anything  to 
anybody for as long as he could remember.
 The  alien creature frowned briefly and consulted what appeared to  be  some 
species of clipboard which he was holding in his thin and spindly alien hand.
 "Cronos Warchild?" it said.
 Cronos nodded helplessly.
 "Cronos *Jehannum* Warchild?" pursued the alien in a kind of efficient yap.
 "Er...er...yes...er...er," confirmed Cronos.
 "You're a jerk," repeated the alien, "a complete asshole."
 "Er..."
 The creature nodded to itself,  made a peculiar alien tick on its  clipboard 
and turned briskly back towards its ship.
 "Er..." said Cronos desperately, "er..."
 "Don't give me that," snapped the alien. It marched up the ramp, through the 
hatchway and disappeared into its ship. The ship sealed itself. It started to 
make a low throbbing hum.
 "Er...er..." Cronos tried to shout, and tried to run helplessly towards it.
 The  ship  made  somewhat more sound,  heaved itself  up  in  the  air,  and 
disappeared in what seemed like a fata-morgasmic blur.
 Totally abashed,  shaken, lovesick and (let's not forget) insulted, Warchild 
stumbled  further.  The  sun  was sinking slowly behind a  couple  of  highly 
unromantic  sand dunes.  If Warchild would have been in  better  spirits,  he 
would have chanted something like,  "I am a poor lonesome mercenary,  and far 
away from home....."
 But he wasn't,  so he couldn't and therefore didn't.  In fact, he decided to 
pass  out  once more,  falling down quite dramatically.  In  the  process  he 
ruined the first date of two teenage scorpions that were brutally obliterated 
by Cronos' bulk.
 When he regained consciousness,  he found himself in a clean, cool bed. When 
he looked up, he saw a very familiar face.
 "Korik!!" he exclaimed full of joy.  Finally,  a trustworthy face. Would the 
madness finally be over?
 "Hi Cronos!" Korik said,  a load of sorros falling off his  shoulders,  "you 
sure are lucky I got tired chasing all those celebrities and deciced to  take 
a nice,  long walk through the desert. You were pretty much dead when I found 
you."
 Things  could  have  been worse,  but could have  been  better  too.  Cronos 
Warchild rescued from pending death by Korik Starchaser, probably the biggest 
git this side of Klaxos Nine.
 Korik  had  recently  got the headlines when he finally  got  hold  of  Miss 
Fragilia Franatica,  the second Princess of the Zantogian Empire. This Empire 
spans  the  larger parts of the eastern spiral arm of the Galaxy  and  is  so 
ginormously wealthy that their Royal Vault covers the outer three planets  of 
the Zantogian system.  Since she is still single,  she is the most wanted and 
also the most famous female in the Universe (even the unknown bits).  Anyway, 
he  got  hold  of her in a very literal way and  her  bodyguard  had  bluntly 
removed  him from her in front of approximately 600 billion viewers  watching 
the  Annual Washing of her Armpits.  The humiliation was  complete  when,  in 
front of those same 600 billion viewers, the princess knocked him out.
 "So  I found you lying there," Korik continued,  "babbling about nurses  and 
insults and ants and honey."
  "Where am I?" Cronos inquired,  glad to have regained the ability to  utter 
anything other than "moo's" of various length and intonation.
 "You're in the Second Desert Hospital For The Very,  Very Dried Out,"  Korik 
replied.
 "Oh..."

 "Hungry", growled a shape in the bed next to Warchild.

 After  a  lot of rummaging in the dusty parts of his  brain,  the  mercenary 
annex  hired  gun recognized the phrase and remembered  vividly  wrestling  a 
ghastly  creature  in a dark tunnel.  It was the sort of  creature  that  ate 
innocent Hobbits and turned to stone when the sun had its rays fall upon it.
 Immediately,  his reflexes took over and in a frenzy of hard-core action and 
deadly  gadgets he savagely ripped the sheets from the bed where  the  sounds 
originated,  ready  to  turn  the shape into something round  and  flat  that 
Italians like to eat. It was quite a surprise to see him moving this fast and 
agilely considering his state.
 Only  barely in time did he recognize the fragile human that turned  out  to 
have uttered the aforementioned phrase.  Warchild's monomolecular - and  thus 
infinitely  sharp - dagger was hovering mere millimetres above the throat  of 
one of the authors of this piece.
 "STEFAN!!" he yelled.
 "Cronos!!" Stefan muttered, his voice still uncertain if it would be wise to 
mutter anything at all.
 There  was a sudden movement in the bed on the other side.  Warchild  turned 
sharply, observing the emerging human.
 "RICHARD!!" he bellowed.
 "Cronos!!" Richard exclaimed, not bothering to mutter since he didn't have a 
frighteningly sharp dagger hovering above his throat.
 "Uuuhhh...Cronos...could you please remove that knife?", Stefan probed.
 "What??  Oh  yeah...sure." The absurdly dangerous weapon  disappeared  wityh 
insane speed somewhere within Warchild's hospital outfit.  He  flinched,  his 
eyes  crossed.  The  two authors looked at a stain of red that  appeared  and 
increased on the meticulous white of the pyjamas.
 "I told you," Stefan said, "it's no use ending a story like this."
 "Maybe," Richard replied, "introducing ourselves broke a few unwritten story 
conventions too many."
 "And let's not forget Cronos' skin," Stefan remarked.
 "And that," Richard said, in thought.
 Someone  was  thinking  of inhuming the nasty person who  had  designed  the 
dagger's sheath.
 At that moment the door opened. Gloria Estefan walked in and started to sing 
"1...2...3".  And that rhymes with "happy" so that's how the story eventually 
ended.

 Original  written  spring 1990,  rehashed September 1994.  Lyric  bits  used 
without permission.


= WIRED =====================================================================
 by Niklas Pivic


 There  was  once a person called Wilma Thearson.  Wilma had worked  for  the 
"National  Publicist"  for twenty years,  and was now in her  early  forties. 
Wilma was the sort of person who didn't have many friends, mainly because she 
wouldn't change her principles - or anything other - for anyone.  Some called 
her obnoxious.  Nevertheless,  Wilma was a widow, and her husband had died an 
early death, which was someone she rarely talked about. Her friends sometimes 
caught her talking about him in a spiritual sense, but never dared to ask her 
about him, not for any reason.
 Now,  Wilma didn't have a lot of life.  But at this time everything  changed 
for  her.  One  of her friends asked her if she wanted to  join  her  working 
nights at the municipal greenhouse (!) with small things like mending  broken 
pots,  planting flowers,  etc. Anything a greenhouse had to offer, for short, 
come  good and bad.  She accepted it,  hoping it would decrease her  sadness, 
which she almost always feltinside.  One night, she met Arthur. Arthur showed 
to  be what Wilma called "a perfect gentleman",  who was in his late  fifties 
and  made  her  feel  young again.  And happy.  They  started  going  out  to 
restaurants, and suddenly Wilma smiled when she was with her friends, telling 
them  of what had happened on her latest meeting with Arthur.  Her  pessimism 
almost  vanished.  It almost was as if she were brought back to  her  youth's 
days,  when there were no troubles at all. Then Arthur made her the proposal. 
They were getting "hitched properly", as she told her friends.
 There was a big ceremony,  almost all of their friends attending,  but  only 
Arthur's  father - their other parents were dead - came,  leading him to  the 
podium and Wilma walking by herself. They were happy, very happy.

 At  the wedding night,  after a lot of  drinking,  singing,  dancing,  etc., 
Arthur  carried  Wilma over the threshold and they made  love.  Some  minutes 
after,  Arthur was excited.  He was very keen on showing some kind of machine 
to Wilma,  which was supposed to be "a blast".  She waited for him to  unpack 
some  kind  of strange-looking case he had under the bed,  and in  some  way, 
connect it *between* the phone cable which went to the phone, standing on the 
bedside-table.  The machine which seemed to split the cable,  consisted of  a 
box with a tube in the middle, sticking out at the edges (up and down).
 "Wilma,  you know I wouldn't do anything in the world to hurt you, now would 
I babe?" Arthur asked Wilma, looking at her excitedly.
 "I do know that,  Arthur, but what's that machine for?" Wilma asked, looking 
awkwardly at the machine which AT&T didn't put there.
 "Darling,  you  know that I've been busy these few days before the  wedding, 
right? I mean, except for the *normal* absence?"
 "Yes?"
 "Well,  I've  been  putting the finishing touches to this  little  machine," 
Arthur  said,  pointing  to the machine.  "It's going to be  our  own  little 
pleasure-dome!"
 "Oh yeah, how?" Wilma asked, raising a brow and a corner of her mouth.
 "Well,  I'll show you," he said, putting the machine on his side of the bed, 
now  sitting on the floor with the machine between him and her.  He  suddenly 
inserted  his right index-finger into the tube and said "Now all you have  to 
do  is to press the number I'll be telling you," at the same time as he  gave 
her a machine, oblong, with a lot of digits and a button with an arrow on it.
 "But what's going to happen?" Wilma asked.
 "Oh, just complete pleasure," he answered, smiling wide.
 He did what he instructed her to do, pressing the right buttons.
 "Now,  point  the controller towards the machine," he instructed  her.  "And 
press the button with the arrow on it." Wilma did so.
 "All we now have to do is wait." he said,  smiling and sitting with his legs 
crossed.

 A minute passed. "Here it comes," he said, watching Wilma as she pulled back 
a little to her side of the bed.  "No,  nothing bad is going to happen to me, 
even  if it looks that way--" He was interrupted by strong  convulsions,  his 
body turning straight on the spot,  having spasms like an epileptic during an 
attack.  "Arthur!" was all Wilma could say.  Suddenly Arthur came to.  He sat 
straight  up,  looking at Wilma as though he had slept for ten hours and  not 
had seen her since. "It was terrific," he said, looking at her terrified eyes 
through his calm ones.  "Nothing to be afraid of.  Mixing electrical currents 
by adding my own machine to it,  suddenly changes a person's vibration level. 
You  feel  like you could take over the universe or something!  Gives  you  a 
*great* self-confidence, anyway. I thought you'd like to try it," he said, as 
he climbed onto the bed, finally kissing Wilma on her mouth.

 "I...I..."  was all Wilma could say,  as she pressed her right hand  to  her 
chest, looking into Arthur's eyes with her very opened ones.
 "Trust me. It will take you to other worlds." he said, kissing her again.

 Wilma lay down, the bed and other things around her carefully put away, with 
her left-hand index-finger in the tube.
 "Don't worry," Arthur said, pressing a lot of numbers on the controller, and 
then, pointing it towards the machine, pressed the arrow.
 "That  should  do  it,  my dear!  You'll feel like a queen in  a  matter  of 
seconds!  Nothing's too good for my lovely!" he said,  smiling and  caressing 
her  face.  Suddenly he looks into her eyes,  and doesn't look as nice as  he 
previously  looked.  His shape changes,  turning into a whirl-pool of  images 
from their wedding, the day they met, etc. Suddenly the pictures aren't post-
Arthur anymore.  They reach back.  Long time back.  Limitlessly.  Colours and 
shades are not of any importance anymore. She knows how the Universe is built 
up, and she has reached her apotheosis.

 Arthur  is  no  longer of any importance.  The world is hers  any  shred  of 
humanity  flows  within  her  blood.  Anything else  stands  as  a  speck  of 
intelligence  within her,  the Earth itself is no longer any intelligence  to 
speak of,  Time isn't any problem,  there are NO LAWS for her anymore. She is 
no longer one with the universe. She Eats the Universe-.

 "Hey kitten! Wake up! You've been in there for a full minute! That's enough! 
Anyone can't stand that much power at first! Up!" Arthur's voice came ringing 
out to her.
 Wilma suddenly felt like someone had given her a  thousand-dollar-note,  and 
then ripped it to pieces. She slapped Arthur.
 "You idiot!  How dare you!" she howled at him,  discovering nothing but  the 
way her finger still was stuck to the machine.
 "Hold on! Hold on!" Arthur said, as he tried to grab her hands.
 "What's this? First you show me something... Something...-"
 "Yes..."  he  grabbed her hands.  "You've entered a world only we  two  know 
about.  I've  been developing this for the last five- "But...  But..."  Wilma 
started shaking the machine like nuts, when phone started ringing.

                                    *****

 When Wilma woke,  she saw Arthur lying in a pool of blood across the  floor. 
She looked at her hand and couldn't see her fingers. Or the rest of her hand. 
Her ex.  hand was covered by the tube, which had increased, becoming one with 
it.
 What  we (the Netrunners) see at the screens everyday had become one of  her 
everyday impulses.  She was connected. The net had absorbed her totally. What 
she knew was the everyday fantasies coming directly from us,  The Netrunners. 
Everything she had ever known became none, and her psyche became the net. She 
controls us everytime we think of her and vice versa.  Her brain is no longer 
one with "the universe".  It doesn't have to be "fantastic".  Look at what we 
have and try to improve this instead of dreaming.  Or shall we skip the whole 
idea for something new?


= HOWARD'S END, OR, THE BEAST IN THE CELLAR =================================
 by Richard Karsmakers


 I will not have it said that I am some kind of deranged person,  not by  the 
mere  fact that I have borne witness to the events I shall relay  henceforth, 
extraordinary as they are.  Even though people have been avoiding me of late, 
pulling up collars and urging their offspring inside with hushed whispers and 
agitated motions, I am still quite certain of my sanity. Yet I shall no doubt 
acquire repeated frowns of your brow once I have disclosed to you in full the 
extent of the horrors I have experienced ever since I moved into that old and 
rather dilapidated house in Providence, Rhode Island.
 Having  graduated  from University last summer,  I had  spent  some  initial 
months hitchhiking,  breathing in the air of my first true freedom and seeing 
many  quaint and sometimes truly beautiful sights.  From car to  truck,  from 
truck to van I went,  stepping into worlds I had never seen, and leaving them 
when the experience became either uncomfortable or somehow claustrophobic.  I 
made casual acquaintance of many people, until in the end my wandering spirit 
died, or at least fell asleep beyond rekindling, and I became gradually aware 
of an ever keening desire in myself to settle and join the life I intended to 
lead until the day of my retirement or my getting tired of it,  whichever was 
likely to happen first.
 Having  had  writing ambitions for as long as I remember,  I  longed  for  a 
somewhat  secluded residence,  having always cherished the inspiration  often 
brought  upon  me by the silence of loneliness,  the gothic quality  of  dusk 
outside town,  the rustle of the wind through the woods and the eerie  sounds 
of nature at night.  I sometimes think my writings saved me from a total loss 
of reason, even after that one terrible night that...
 But no,  allow me to relate to you the story from its very  beginning,  from 
the  moment I first caught sight of my new domicile to the moment that  these 
people  came to fetch me and locked me in the dreadful,  half-dark room  with 
its by now familiarly damp, fungi-bespecked stone walls, leaving me only with 
the few writing utensils I employ to trust to paper my story now.  There  are 
still a few hours left before the lights are put out,  which will bring to me 
yet  another gloomy and sleepless night pregnant with the hauntings  of  dark 
memories  -  memories so penumbral I would myself not  have  considered  them 
possible if it hadn't been me they were haunting.
 It had been one of those almost proverbially sunny days,  one of those  days 
one  which fate smiles benignly and everything happens the way it  should.  I 
went to a Providence real estate agent's to enquire if perhaps there would be 
any  vacant properties to let.  I had thought of purchasing,  but  decided  I 
would need my scant savings for other things first.  Once writer's wealth had 
found  me - if ever it would - I could always look out for something  to  one 
day call my own.
 As it was,  however,  there was little choice for me. There were only two or 
three places to let,  of which all but one were too small and located  rather 
in  the centre of town,  far away from the silence I would need to strike  my 
inspiration's  light  and at too large a distance from  a  healthy  morning's 
stroll  through  the forest I longed for.  The one left was  a  rather  large 
house,  built  of  wood and looking all but dilapidated.  Upon  studying  the 
picture in more detail a clerk came up to me - in retrospect he seemed  quite 
eager  for something - to tell me that in fact the house was in  pretty  mint 
condition  despite  its outer looks,  and that the last  previous  owner,  an 
elderly lady,  had passed away fairly recently.  The clerk himself could have 
passed for the very old woman's husband,  for he appeared haggard and ageing, 
dressed stiffly,  balding,  with two patches of grey hair hiding part of  his 
ears and the arms of his glasses. Something about his disposition also seemed 
to imply a personal involvement, perhaps a more than casual acquaintance with 
the deceased.
 I imagined the place being quite deserted save six or seven cats that  would 
all purr and rub my legs as I walked in, a new owner of the place. I imagined 
its dank smell, the hairs on the couch, a layer of gathered dust on a dresser 
the  next  of kin had forgotten to cover with linen.  I imagined  the  stairs 
making  woody noises under my feet as I ascended to the top floor landing  on 
my way to pick out a room where I would henceforth put myself to  sleep,  and 
decide  upon  another  room  where I could  put  my  typewriter.  This  would 
preferably have to be one with a hearth.
 Despite the fact that the house,  perched on a small hill with a bare valley 
below and dark green forests behind,  appeared much like one of those  places 
where women were bloodily knifed to death in showers,  I decided to take  it. 
The rent was affordable,  and as it was the horror genre I wished to  explore 
and  possibly  redefine with my future writings I estimated  this  particular 
house  would  be all the more inspiring for my work.  I decided to  keep  the 
cats, should there be any.
 When  I  nodded and asked more as to the conditions of rent  and  where  the 
document  was  that I had to sign,  I could have sworn I heard the  man  sigh 
profoundly.  At the time I didn't make much of it, but now I know why the man 
let out that obvious sign of relief.  I wonder if he knew anything about  the 
*real* horror,  anything other than the superstitions that might have  roamed 
the  little  village,  preventing  any of the locals  from  wanting  to  have 
anything to do with the house or its inhabitants.
 That might also have explained the fact that none of the agency's  employees 
seemed at all willing to show me the way to the estate and there give me  the 
guided  tour I had expected came with any such agreement.  The same man  that 
had  uttered  the  deep sigh handed me the key,  and I  distinctly  recall  a 
lingering sense of guilt in the way he looked at me - and kept looking at  me 
until I left the office and had disappeared out of sight.

 If anything, the house looked even more desolate in reality than it had done 
on  the picture.  It still appeared as if it was falling apart at the  seams, 
though,  and  I can tell you that I was not particularly looking  forward  to 
autumn,  when nocturnal darkness would fall early and hide from view the bits 
that  would  be torn off if any storm dared tug at the  ancient  woodwork.  I 
looked  around me.  Something was distinctly discomforting,  but  I  couldn't 
quite  put my finger on it.  The sun was already setting,  and in the  valley 
below  a few lights on farms and homesteads had already been switched  on.  I 
estimated the nearest to be about two or three miles off,  but the  gathering 
dusk made it difficult for me to estimate it more accurately.
 I walked up the garden path, at which time it became apparent what seemed so 
odd.  There were no sounds. Even though I saw the woods behind the house move 
to and fro gently in the evening breeze, the leaves made no sound whatsoever. 
All I heard was the soft wind in my ears, hardly enough to blot out all other 
noises.  At the time,  however, like the unconscious knowledge of the clerk's 
sigh lingering somewhere within a deep recess of my mind,  I made no more  of 
it.  It was just a really quiet late summer's evening. Probably the wind took 
the voice of the forest away from me, back to its own centre.
 When  I  stood in front of the door I put down my  luggage,  fumbled  in  my 
pockets for a while trying to find the key.  Once retrieved, I inserted it in 
the  lock and turned.  There was a twist,  some resistance,  a  click.  After 
opening the door I went inside and locked it again. The typically cool are of 
a perpetually shuttered house embraced me.
 My  premonitions about a cat had been right.  A lean black animal with  eyes 
shining bright yellow in the half-dark descended the stairs and came  towards 
me, rubbed my leg for a while and then lost interest.
 There was quite a stench.  I couldn't quite identify whether it was just the 
dank  dustiness  of a long-empty home or something else.  I  put  my  luggage 
inside  and closed the door behind me.  The stench seemed to grow.  I had  to 
find out where it came from.  I followed my senses,  which let me go down  an 
old  and rather noisy stairway to the cellar.  I fumbled for a light  switch, 
found  it,  flicked it,  and found a pale light emerging from a single  light 
bulb in the middle of the cellar.  There was a boiler,  the kind that  groans 
and  clanks when toiling but that currently wasn't active,  as well  as  some 
half-decomposed old paper piles. The smell gathered intensity. I knew what it 
was.  It  was the smell of death.  Maybe the cat had a private store of  dead 
mice or rats down here.  I followed its black form around a corner in the  L-
shaped room,  suddenly to find my stomach twisting.  I had to swallow to keep 
from  retching  too  violently as I saw about half a dozen  dead  cats  lying 
there.  They were partly decomposed, their eyes glassy and dull in the scarse 
light,  small  insects crawling over the fur and partly  exposed  innards.  I 
could have sworn the cats had died of fright;  I am not quite sure what  cats 
look  like when they're scared out of their skulls,  but I reckoned it  might 
very well be the way these cats looked.  The teeth were visible like those of 
an angry cat, the hairs on their backs raised in post-mortem.
 I went back up, switching off the light as I left, resolving to clean up the 
whole cellar the next day.  I was beat,  for some reason or other, and wanted 
first to go to bed and have a good night's rest.  The one living cat followed 
me  up  the  stairs.  It seemed to show no affection but a need  to  join  me 
upstairs,  as if being all on its own was simply too bleak a prospect to  the 
animal. I didn't think much of it, though, at the time.
 Little did I know of length of the night ahead of me.
 I am not easily frightened,  nor afraid of the dark,  but at night the house 
seemed to have its own subtle means of producing inexplicable  sounds.  Never 
were  they actually clear enough to be able to tell their cause.  Whenever  I 
had  identified a specific sound to listen to with more attention it  ceased, 
to  be  replaced  by another sound that took a while  to  isolate,  and  then 
disappeared again to be replaced by another.  It was like looking intently at 
a  star in the sky and suddenly seeing it disappear when looking straight  at 
it. Somehow the sounds seemed to want to elude me.
 At  some instants I could have sworn to hear the cellar stairs making  their 
familiar creaking noise,  as if someone else,  *something* else,  was in  the 
house. Surely I had locked the front door? I knew I had.
 At  just  past  midnight the cat starting making a  strange  whining  noise, 
something quite unlike the sounds I had ever heard cats make.  I had left  it 
outside the bedroom door,  as I wasn't wont to have a cat on the  bed,  which 
was where they were most likely to turn up eventually if only you'd give them 
the  chance.  I had once read a book where mention was made that  cats  could 
steal your breath away if they slept on your chest,  but I am quite sure that 
had been no part in my decision to leave it outside.
 I sat up straight,  trying to establish the reason for the cat's discomfort. 
There were some sounds,  like there had been all along, again seeming to want 
to  elude me.  I lit a candle and got out of bed.  The cat seemed to  startle 
from  my appearance through the bedroom door and scratched viciously  at  me, 
lacerating my pyjama trousers and tearing my flesh at the surface.  I  cursed 
and tried to kick the cat but already it was gone.
 It struck me that the cat seemed to want to evade being close to the  walls, 
as if it were playing some childish game with deadly seriousness.
 I touched my leg.  It might be torn but barely bled.  I probably didn't even 
have to get a tetanus shot.
 When my attention once more shifted from my leg to the house,  the noises  I 
heard  seemed louder.  Moreover,  they seemed to come from  downstairs  quite 
explicitly.  The  cellar?  Were there rats,  feasting on half a  dozen  cats' 
mortal remains?
 My cat suddenly stood still, tail curling and twisting strangely and somehow 
significantly,  in front of a door to a room I had not yet explored.  The cat 
made  a  frightful  noise,  then attacked the  door,  started  scratching  it 
viciously.
 I walked to the door and held the knob.  It was cold to the touch.  The  cat 
retreated  when it sensed my intent of opening the door.  I could have  sworn 
there was a presence in the room, but the feeling disappeared at the instance 
I turned the knob and pushed it open.  There was a slight woosh of air,  cold 
and unmistakable,  a draught probably. Next instant it was gone. I closed the 
door behind me, feeling a perverse desire to cover my back.
 The flickering flame of my candle threw strange shadows across the table and 
books  that  seemed to be the prime feature of the small room.  There  was  a 
window  in  one wall but its heavy curtains were drawn.  Had it  been  day  I 
seriously doubted there would have been any more light.
 I looked up and down the walls.  There were strangely surrealistic pictures, 
some rather scary.  Some portrayed church towers around which haunting shapes 
had  somehow draped themselves.  Others showed a lonely writer with  a  large 
looming *something* behind him,  threatening to strike at the first opportune 
moment.  The most terrible of all,  and I couldn't help but be fascinated  by 
it, was a huge demonic monster stretching out its clawed forelimbs to a water 
vessel,  the background filled with unnaturally large blocks,  like slabs  of 
concrete,  tilting  halfway  out of the ocean as if they  had  been  recently 
revealed remnants of domiciles of a frightful and oversized race of beings no 
longer known to earth.
 I went closer to see the writing on the bottom part of its frame.  "Cthulhu" 
it  read,  simply,  but  this  simple word instilled in me  a  fear  I  would 
previously have considered myself incapable of feeling.  What had happened to 
me?  What had happened to the ever-present rationalisations with which I used 
to drive other people out of their minds with irritation?
 It  was then that I saw the diary.  It lay on the desk,  covered with  dust, 
with an inkpot next to it. A quill stuck in the ink pot but the ink had dried 
to a thick crust,  locking the writing utensil. Why hadn't the writer put the 
lid back on the inkpot?
 I  must have stared at the diary,  thinking of its implications,  for a  few 
minutes  before I finally stretched out a hand to take it.  I blew  the  dust 
off,  revealing  the  initials  "H.P.L." Who  was  this  mysterious  previous 
occupant? The old woman they had mentioned?
 I  opened  the book.  I had expected a leathery croak,  but still  the  only 
sounds  I  heard  were those I assumed came from  the  cellar.  The  cat  had 
developed an odd affection for my leg,  rubbing against it. It seemed totally 
unaware of having scratched me mere minutes before.
 I  turned  pages  to the end.  The handwriting  was  meticulously  executed, 
densely written.  It was a bit archaic, using a complex vocabulary. I arrived 
at the last page that was written on.  March 15th 1937.  The diary must  have 
been of someone - judging by the handwriting probably a man - who lived  here 
prior to the old woman, or maybe even before that. Why had the room been left 
intact, untouched since as far back as 1937?
 A  felt a strange morbidity take over me as I read what might have been  the 
man's last writings.

 "I  feel death tugging at me.  Things are getting out of control.  Should  I 
notify  the authorities of...even now,  I can't get myself to write down  the 
words.  Is  the ancient Mythos true after all?  And why do the cats act  thus 
strangely? Yesterday night I heard the noises intensify, but now they make it 
almost  completely impossible for me to think.  There are scratchings at  the 
door. What creature stands there? Is it"

 At that instant the man must have been distracted,  or startled mortally  by 
something.  Attached to the final "t" was a long scratch,  then nothing.  Had 
these words been his *very last*?  If so,  who - or *what* - had put back the 
quill in the inkpot?  I leafed through the diary,  reading some further parts 
that  were  all  but  horrible.  Then to the first  page...there  was a name. 
Howard...
 Below,  whatever  was there didn't go through great lengths  disguising  its 
sounds.  I was certain I heard steps,  but they were soft, as if made by bare 
feet.  Or furry claws. My imagination was getting the better of me, but those 
sounds were real.
 Any  moment,  somehow,  I expected scratchings at the door like the man  had 
described in his last moments.  This place was too much. Or perhaps there was 
a  logical  explanation that I would discover in the morning?  That  was  it, 
probably.  I had merely got what I had catered for - a house that inspired me 
to write horror stories.
 Behind  me there was a bookcase containing various tomes.  Like  the  diary, 
they  were  covered with dust.  It was obvious that this room had  been  left 
untouched completely,  almost reveredly so. The books seemed to cover various 
arcane and occult topics.  There was a book about Satanism, even. Had the man 
been a Satan Worshipper or had he perhaps, like me, just bought the books for 
research purposes,  him being a writer perhaps?  My breath stuck in my throat 
as  I saw among the books a leather-bound copy of the book of the  Mad  Arab, 
"Necronomicon".  An intricately shaped pentagram was engraved on it,  in  the 
colour of silver. I felt strangely elated but horrified too. I had rented the 
house  previously owned by a person that had The Dread Book!  No wonder  that 
this   house   seemed   to   attract   its   particularities.   My   previous 
rationalisations suddenly seeming trivial.  Perhaps there was truly something 
going on in,  or around,  this house.  Suddenly, I remember the clerk's sigh, 
the weirdness of there being no sound when I had stood outside, surveying the 
house. The total lack of people around this place.
 I left the room,  cursing at myself for superstitiously scanning the hallway 
to  my  bedroom  for strange  appearances.  The  sounds  continued  unabated, 
crawling up the stairs as if alive. I found myself dashing to the bedroom and 
slamming the door behind me. I didn't heed the cat's scratchings at the door, 
frantic  almost,  that progressed until the morning when I awoke  from  about 
half  a dozen short sleeps that had each been haunted by strange  noises  and 
even stranger voices coming from my cellar.
 When  the  pale  sun struck my face,  waking me  for  the  final  time,  the 
scratching had ceased.
 After  refreshing myself I left the bedroom.  The hallway  seemed  perfectly 
normal now. Had I closed the mysterious room or had it somehow closed itself? 
I couldn't remember, but it was closed nonetheless.
 The  cat was nowhere to be seen,  and there wasn't a sound,  not even  those 
that could penetrate from the outside.  I descended the stairs,  listening to 
their  familiar  woody  noises.  After making myself some  breakfast  -  it's 
strange how a bite to eat can change your outlook on a past night's events  - 
I fetched a large bag and went down into the cellar to clean up.
 When  I switched the light a hammer of fright struck up and down  my  spine, 
making my ears ring quite literally.  On the floor lay the cat that had  been 
alive but few hours before.  Its limbs were extended and nailed to the floor, 
its  entrails spilling from a gash in its abdomen.  It hadn't been done by  a 
knife, I could see. The edges of the wound were far too rough, too uneven. It 
must  have been fangs.  The cat had been dead for hours,  obviously.  It  was 
already going mouldy, ants and flies having been at it longer than an hour at 
least.
 A shiver ran through my entire being.  What had made those scratching noises 
at my door up to the early morning dusk?
 Struck by paranoia, I looked behind me. There was nothing save the stairs. I 
took  my  hand from the light switch,  where it had remained as if  glued  of 
paralyzed.
 I  bolted  up  the stairs.  There was something  ghastly  about  the  house, 
definitely. I could easily have imagined the sounds or the whole mystery room 
for  that matter;  I could have had a nightmare or something.  But now I  was 
wide  awake and certainly I had not just imagined the dead cat,  horribly cut 
up, or half-eaten, or whatever.
 What  to do?  Go back to the real estate agent's and claim my money back  on 
claims  of there being something horrible in the house?  They would  have  me 
fetched  by the men in white coats.  One card short of a full deck,  lost  my 
marbles,  that kind of thing.  No, I would solve all of this myself. I was an 
adult,  I  was up to it.  There was probably a very logical explanation  that 
would render all superstitions and weird thoughts futile.

 I spent most of the day preparing myself for the night. I did not have a gun 
but I had found a crowbar in a shack in the garden.  Whatever it was that ate 
cats at night, I would surely be able to handle it. I took a short nap in the 
afternoon so it wouldn't be too hard to stay awake the whole night.
 The nap took longer than I had intended.  It was already darkening  outside, 
and there was wind tugging at the ancient walls and roof.  It rained  softly, 
but  there wasn't a doubt in my mind that the rain would get  heavier  during 
the night. There were a few lightning flashes outside, but the thunder itself 
was too far to reach me - yet.
 I  pulled on my sturdiest set of trousers,  the working trousers that I  had 
done  some  fruitpicking  labour in,  last summer  somewhere.  I  hefted  the 
crowbar, tapping it on the palm of my other hand.
 I didn't light a candle when I went down.  The darkness was almost  complete 
now,  and the sounds were already occurring again. There was no moon outside, 
and  had  there been any I doubt if it would have been full.  I  knew  I  had 
resolved  to get whatever was in my house in the very cellar,  but  my  knees 
felt weak as I touched the cellar door's knob.  It was cold, like that of the 
mysterious room the other night.
 "What the hell," I thought to myself, "I had better get it over with."
 I threw open the cellar door,  feeling like a hero for an instant. There was 
no  applause,  however,  which tore me back to reality.  The sounds were  not 
actually  deafening,  but already they were beyond the  comfortably  audible, 
distorting slightly.
 I could see nothing but darkness in which I fancied shadows moving. I put my 
hand on the light switch,  at which moment there was an angrily hissing noise 
coming from the far side of the cellar, where the half dozen dead cats lay. I 
could  have  sworn  there was a munching sound,  but it ceased  at  the  very 
instant  I flicked the switch.  There was no light though.  One moment  later 
something  was thrown through the cellar - I caught a very brief  glimpse  of 
something  metallic in a ray of light that was emitted  from  somewhere.  The 
next instant I felt it crashing at my feet.
 The light bulb. Whatever was with me in this cellar, had some sentience. The 
thought  of  an intelligent monster scared me witless.  As if *it*  had  some 
immaculate sense of drama, it chose this moment to reveal to me two bloodshot 
eyes at about 10 feet distance from me. I froze to the spot, suddenly finding 
the cellar very warm.  I felt my forehead suddenly moist,  and as I regripped 
the crowbar I felt the perspiration in my hands making it slightly  slippery. 
I swung the bar,  but the creature's eyes didn't even blink. It was still too 
far off for it to be hit by me, but already it was far too close to my taste.
 I got a strange urge to start yelling at the beast,  cursing, hollering, but 
thought better of it. People did that in cheap horror B films. This was class 
A reality, as bad as it ever gets.
 The beast closed its eyes. I heard a faint hint of a shuffle, then it opened 
its eyes again.  A bit closer.  It was homing in on me.  I saw before me  the 
morning's slaughter,  the cat, its guts spilled on the floor, the odd lack of 
blood. Lack of blood? I had never really liked cats but I didn't want to suck 
them dry either.  Outside I heard a rolling sound of thunder that belonged to 
a flash of lightning I hadn't seen.
 I  turned around and ran up the stairs.  This seemed exactly the moment  the 
beast,  animal,  monster,  abomination,  had  been  waiting for.  I  felt  it 
speaking in my head.  It spoke in vivid images,  black and red all over.  Its 
tongue I did now know,  but it must have been a universal language dormant in 
all living beings.  I knew it was speaking of death,  impending death.  And I 
was the one going to be it.
 All of this had taken an instant, a precious instant, in which my run up the 
stairs had slowed down. It had been sufficient for the horribly vile creature 
to gain on me and grab an ankle.  Mortal dread hurled itself over me,  and  I 
think I cried in panic,  begging for someone,  someone,  please,  someone, to 
help me.  But I knew there would be nobody to hear.  There was a thunderstorm 
outside, and nobody liked to go here anyway.
 Frantically I kicked.  When the grip loosened and I got to run up  again,  I 
couldn't get rid of the impression that I had escaped only because it  wanted 
me to.  It wanted to play with me,  not just kill me,  eat me, do whatever it 
wanted with me. It seemed pointless the slam the cellar door behind me, but I 
did so anyway.
 As  I  retreated in the ground floor hallway,  towards  the  front  door,  I 
rediscovered the crowbar in my hand.  Why hadn't I used it on the beast?  Had 
it  had some psychological hold on me?  I heard the sound  of  feet,  *clawed 
furry fangs*,  on the cellar stairs.  My eyes opened wide, but I suppressed a 
cry of fear. I could handle this. I hefted the crowbar again. I was an adult. 
I  could  handle this,  sure I could.  There was some fumbling at the  cellar 
door,  after  which it opened slowly.  Its  hinges made no noise  whatsoever. 
Then the eyes came,  amid a silhouette humpy and horrible,  with limbs  where 
there shouldn't be any. And fangs. There was some light, from somewhere, that 
caught the fangs, long and white-yellowish, dripping with saliva.
 For a moment it seemed as if the house rode the lightning. Horribly explicit 
the  beast became as it crawled forth from the cellar door opening.  I  fell, 
the way dumb women in films fall,  cursing at my own stupidity. I clung on to 
the crowbar as if it was my life insurance.  It *was*. Not a good one, but it 
was all I had.
 "Come on," I said, trying to sound threatening but probably failing. I could 
have  sworn  the  monster  grinned  as it  poised  itself  to  leap,  like  a 
grotesquely misformed, many-limbed large cat. I clambered back, eye to horrid 
eye  with certain death.  It spoke to me again,  spoke of charred  flesh  and 
blood  pouring  from  wounds  shaped  like  serrated  edges,   fangs,  white, 
yellowish, dripping.
 There was a violent knocking behind me, suddenly, and I could have sworn the 
beast's grin widened. I cried in dismay, causing the knocking, the *slamming* 
on  the front door,  to increase.  The monster must have warned a  previously 
invisible  partner  outside.  I was cornered.  Why had I not thought  of  the 
possibility?  Monsters  came individually in class B horror films.  This  was 
class A reality. Here they came in twos. At least.
 I  yanked open the front door,  at the precise instant of which a  flash  of 
lightning  almost  directly atop my flashed  mercilessly,  the  sound  coming 
within the same moment,  obliterating my hearing. I had my back to the cellar 
creature,  and now faced a squat threat, appearing hideously misformed in the 
bolt  of  lightning  as it sped through the sky.  I  swung  the  crowbar.  It 
impacted  something hard that gave way.  I swung  again,  hacked,  until  the 
wretched creature fell down,  and then I hit some more until the crowbar came 
back gleaming red with bits of hair clinging to it.
 Something laughed behind me,  the disturbed,  loud laugh of the irredeemably 
insane.  I swirled around,  where one more lightning flash revealed to me the 
form of the impure creature as it retreated down to the cellar,  as if it had 
successfully performed its task.
 I looked down on the dead shape lying on my doorstep. The rain lashed at its 
remains.  As  the throes of half-madness left me be,  I recognised in it  the 
clerk  that  had arranged this house for me.  Why had he come  here  at  this 
ungodly hour?  Why? Why had the vile creature downstairs projected in my mind 
visions of an evil accomplice, of death upon me instantly?
 I sank to my knees,  no longer able to suppress my sobbing.  In the  morning 
men came to take my numb self away.

 Maybe I should never have opened the maddeningly explicit diary after I  had 
read  its  former owner's name.  Maybe I should simply have  left,  never  to 
return,  when  I discovered I had moved into a house previously  occupied  by 
Howard  Phillips Lovecraft,  a house that no doubt gave birth to many of  his 
horror stories.
 But now it's too late.

 Written during a few sessions in early summer,  finished July 23rd  1994.  I 
think the Lovecraft inspiration is pretty obvious...


= SOON COMING ===============================================================


 The next issue of "Twilight World",  Volume 2 Issue 6, is to be released mid 
November this year.  Please refer to the 'subscription' section,  below,  for 
details about automatically getting it in case you're interested.
 Please  refer to the section on 'submitting',  below,  for more  details  on 
submitting your own material.
 The next issue will probably contain the following items...

 INTERGALACTIC SEX FANTASY
 by Bryan Kennerley

 NEBULUS
 by Richard Karsmakers

 FIRE & BRIMSTONE
 by Richard Karsmakers

 TORVAK THE WARRIOR
 by Stefan Posthuma

 AND MORE


= SOME GENERAL REMARKS ======================================================


 DESCRIPTION

 "Twilight World" is an on-line magazine aimed at everybody who is interested 
in any sort of fiction - although it usually tends to concentrate on fantasy-
and science-fiction.
 One of its sources is an Atari ST/TT/Falcon disk magazine by the name of "ST 
NEWS" which publishes computer-related articles as well as fiction. "Twilight 
World" principally consists of the best fiction featured in "ST NEWS" so far, 
with added stories submitted by dedicated "Twilight World" readers.

 SUBMISSIONS

 If you've written some good fiction and you wouldn't mind it being published 
world-wide,  you can mail it to me either electronically or by standard mail. 
At all times do I reserve the right not to publish submissions.  Do note that 
submissions  on  disk  will have to use the  MS-DOS/Atari  ST/TT/Falcon  disk 
format on 3.5" Double-or High-Density floppy disk.  Provided sufficient  IRCs 
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 COPYRIGHT

 Unless  specified along with the individual stories,  all  "Twilight  World" 
stories are copyrighted by the individual authors but may be spread wholly or 
separately  to  any  place - and indeed into any other  magazine  -  provided 
credit is given both to the original author and "Twilight World".

 CORRESPONDENCE ADDRESS

 I prefer electronic correspondence,  but regular stuff (such as  postcards!) 
can  be sent to my regular address.  If you expect a reply please supply  one 
International Reply Coupon (available at your post office), *two* if you live 
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Coupons per disk (and one extra if you live outside  Europe).  Correspondence 
failing these guidelines will be read (and perused) but not replied to.
 The address (valid at least up to summer 1995):

 Richard Karsmakers
 Looplantsoen 50
 NL-3523 GV Utrecht
 The Netherlands
 Email r.c.karsmakers@stud.let.ruu.nl

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 Thanks!

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