Freak Show of the Gods: And Other Stories of the Bizarre

Introduction

Why on Earth would a freelance business writer with over eighty nonfiction books, all published by mainstream publishing houses—including McGraw-Hill, Prentice Hall, HarperCollins, and John Wiley—write a book of science fiction and fantasy stories?

Well, although I became a full-time professional writer in 1979, I’ve been writing short stories on and off since I was a teenager in the seventies. Of those, the stories in this book represent the best of the bunch, at least in my opinion.

I submitted my stories sporadically to science fiction and literary magazines in my teens and early twenties, and once again a few years ago. The results were poor. I sold one story to Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine (Never Look Back), but the magazine folded and it was never published. I don’t think it was the fifty dollars they paid me for the story that pushed them over the edge financially, though.

This book doesn’t represent a large cash outlay for you. You see, I don’t want you to take a big risk trying my stories, so Quill Driver Books has put the collection out as an affordable paperback instead of as a costly hardcover. So you’ve gambled little to sample my tales. And if you like the stories, I’m glad, and you’ve gotten a bargain.

Anyway, enough preamble. Here are my stories.

Van Helsing’s Last Stand

Although he had steeled himself for this moment and fortified his resolve with a brandy, he shivered when he heard his name being called by a voice emanating from just outside his heavy wooden front door. Instantly the false bravado he had talked himself into believing dissolved like a teaspoon of sugar in boiling water.

Abraham . . .

He did not reply. It had found him. Now the game would begin.

Abraham . . .

He took another sip of brandy. His hand shook and the brandy sloshed. He put the snifter down. He picked up his wire-rimmed glasses and put them on.

Abraham . . . let me in . . .

He sighed. He was getting too old for this. They both were.

Enter of your own free will, Abraham Van Helsing replied to the monster outside his front door.

It opened slowly, untouched, as if moved by an unseen hand. The moonlight spilled across the threshold into the room. The count followed.

Good evening, Abraham, Dracula said in a flat, icy tone. Chilling. They both knew why he had come.

Vlad, the doctor replied without emotion.

Dracula stepped forward into the room. The door hissed closed behind him.

You’ve picked a beautiful place to spend your declining years, the vampire said. He looked up at the moon shining through the skylight and sighed. I have always loved the woods at night, especially by the light of the moon.

Let’s not waste each other’s time, Van Helsing said. You came to discuss a ‘transaction,’ as you called it in your last letter. But you have traveled far for nothing. I will not change my mind. The rights are mine. I don’t plan to relinquish or share them. Why should I? I did all the work.

"But there is no story without me! Dracula said fiercely, taking a menacing step closer. It is mine, my life, my tragedy, and the royalties should be half mine!"

He was talking about Dracula by Bram Stoker. But there was no Bram Stoker, of course. Bram Stoker was Van Helsing’s pen name.

I didn’t realize how hard up you are for cash, Van Helsing said mockingly. Do you need a loan? His tone was jocular and assured. But he wished he felt as confident as he sounded.

I need what is mine, and I shall have it, Dracula said coldly, baring his fangs.

The masses believed Dracula was an old novel and a scary character featured in dozens of motion pictures. To Dracula, it was his life story. To Van Helsing, it was a financial empire that had permitted him to give up his London medical practice long, long ago, and to buy this historic house deep in the Pennsylvania woods, as well as additional properties in the Bahamas and Europe. He had published the novel under his Stoker nom de plume. And he was shrewd enough to employ experienced agents and business managers, and as a result controlled most of the print, film, broadcast, cable, theatrical, e-book, games, and merchandise properties the Count had spawned. If Dracula truly knew how rich Van Helsing was . . . well, the doctor shuddered to think about it.

Many decades after the book’s publication, the Count had resurfaced. But instead of threatening to turn Van Helsing and those around him into the undead, he had demanded a fifty percent share of all Dracula revenues.

Van Helsing had refused. In response, Dracula had hinted that he would sue. But a lawsuit from a vampire was absurd: Trials are held during the day. Letters, increasingly insistent, came to Van Helsing from the Count, each from a location closer to Pennsylvania. The most recent said that if no satisfactory answer was forthcoming by post, the issue would have to be resolved in person. Van Helsing had ignored this, too, and as a consequence, he now faced the Count—in his own country home—once more.

Dracula pulled opened his dinner jacket and withdrew an envelope from the breast pocket.

I hired a literary attorney to draw up a contract assigning half the revenues from the story and its entertainments to me, the Count explained. If you wish to survive the night, you will sign it for me now.

Of course, Van Helsing said amiably, the fight seemingly gone out of him. Bring it over here, and I will sign at once.

The Count smiled. He took a step forward. Then another. And another. But halfway across the room, he took another step and cried out as if in pain. Quickly he pulled his leg back and looked down at his foot, which seemed to be smoldering from within the highly polished black leather shoe he wore.

What trickery is this? Dracula demanded, fixing Van Helsing with a hardened stare.

But Van Helsing did not wither under the vampire’s gaze.

You’ve never learned to mind your surroundings, he said. If you had been more observant, like your old enemy Holmes, you would have noticed that I have purchased and rebuilt a most interesting historic property for my current abode.

Dracula said nothing but wore a puzzled frown. He tried moving forward again and could not, stopped as if repelled by an invisible wall.

This house is Fallingwater, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, Van Helsing said. The Western Pennsylvania Conservancy ran out of funding, had to unload the property, and sold it to me. Because it had fallen into utter disrepair and the price was high, there were few other takers, and I, in turn, was allowed to ignore the usual restrictions against modernization of historic buildings. I spent a small fortune—which, of course, thanks to the book, I have in spades—to restore the property. Do you know, Count, why the home is called Fallingwater?

Dracula was silent, but his expression moved from puzzlement to understanding.

That’s right, Vlad, Dr. Van Helsing said. The house is built over a stream and waterfall. I added this front room, and the stream runs under it, bisecting the room down the middle.

Which is why . . .

Which is why you can’t cross the room to get to me, old sport, said Van Helsing, as if reciting from a textbook. The vampire may not cross running water.

Dracula hissed.

Hiss away, Van Helsing said, reaching again for the snifter and taking a sip of brandy. He snorted. I am fortunate that my readers don’t fully realize how weak your kind really is. If they did, I think our readership and movie attendance would be much lower.

Weak? Dracula snapped. I’ll tear your throat out!

Oh, really? replied Van Helsing. How? You’re a bundle of vulnerabilities! The stream under the floor here prevents you from crossing over to my side of the room. You couldn’t even enter the house unless I invited you inside. I can keep you off me in any number of ways: silver, crosses, garlic, wolfs bane, sun lamps, holy water. Then there are silver bullets, wooden stakes, fire, decapitation, and sunlight. You really aren’t that hard to kill. Van Helsing casually rose from the chair and, holding what looked like a canister of mace in his hand, ambled over to the invisible line that divided the room into two areas, one of which Dracula could not enter.

Then why do I still live? Dracula retorted, still testing the invisible threshold but still driven back by the stream under the floor.

I have been asking myself that very question, said Van Helsing. And truth be told, I don’t have a good answer. That’s why I lured you here tonight. You’ve lived too long, Impaler, and I don’t really need you alive to keep cashing in on our adventures. So this house has been very carefully prepared to control you and, if I desire, do more than that.

Van Helsing deliberately raised the canister of mace until it was level with Dracula’s face and calmly pressed the button. Fluid sprayed into the vampire’s eyes. He screamed, covered his face with his hands, and moaned in pain.

For example, mace is nothing but pepper spray, Van Helsing explained. It was easy enough to replace the pepper spray with a pressurized supply of liquid garlic instead.

Dracula raised an eyebrow. Feh, said the vampire contemptuously. Your tricks cannot hold me here. He turned toward the front door—and recoiled as if stunned by a cattle prod. A large cross was affixed to the inside of the door. He shrunk back and looked anxiously to the heavy drapes covering the room’s many windows.

Van Helsing put down the mace can and picked up a device that appeared to be a TV remote control. I can do more than hold you here, ancient enemy, he said ominously. You have gone on too long. Everything has an end, and the time for yours is near at hand.

Dracula dabbed at his face with his sleeve to remove the last of the garlic spray, which had turned his normally pale complexion bright red and caused his eyes to tear blood.

Speaking of going on too long, how is it that you are here with me after all these years? asked the Count.

Vampires are but one of the supernatural creatures who enjoy unnatural longevity, said Van Helsing. I have devoted my life as a scientist—now the equivalent of many lives—to the study of vampires and their kin in the world of the strange. However, I’m afraid that contamination is an occupational risk of the laboratory scientist, and I have accidentally mixed my blood with the blood of unnatural beings too many times. The result is that I age more rapidly than you but much more slowly than a normal man.

He raised the device in his hand and pointed it at the vampire. With supernatural speed, Dracula’s hand shot out, grabbed the doctor’s pale and bony wrist, squeezed, and pulled Van Helsing across the room, over the stream, to his side. Van Helsing cried out in surprise and pain. He had dropped the black control box, which fell spinning to the floor.

Dracula twisted the wrist, forcing the elderly doctor to his knees. A moonbeam from the skylight in the ceiling illuminated the spot where Van Helsing knelt, and he seemed to convulse at its touch.

I like these odds better, said the Transylvanian. He felt something move under his hand where he held Van Helsing’s wrist firm; perhaps his eyes were playing tricks, but the wrist looked larger and less pale, and was covered with coarse hairs that Dracula swore had not been there a moment earlier.

You soon won’t, Van Helsing snarled. To Dracula’s amazement, Van Helsing rose to his feet, despite the pressure of the vampire’s grip on his wrist.

Their eyes locked. Dracula turned his hypnotic gaze upon the doctor. Van Helsing seemed unaffected; his own eyes were bloodshot and wild. He stood up straight and yanked his arm free of Dracula’s hold, even as the seams of his shirt ripped and his arms seemed to gain length and musculature.

Dracula looked up at the full moon through the skylight and understood what was happening. You’re alive all these centuries because you are marked by the pentagram! he snarled as the two faced each other.

Van Helsing smiled, revealing newly sprouted canines to rival Dracula’s own.

An accident resulting from my research many years ago with Talbot, said Van Helsing, his face contorted in pain as his body morphed into something bigger, stronger, hairier, and his nails elongated and hardened into claws. The human is the natural prey of the vampire, Van Helsing said through gritted teeth. But the vampire is the natural prey of the werewolf. I wonder, Vlad, who is the hunter and who is the hunted now? I have a sudden hankering for a goulash, Vlad, and my recipe is just as tasty with bat as with beef. He howled at the moon as the pace of transformation quickened.

Dracula knew he had minutes, maybe even seconds. With a howl of his own, he shoved Van Helsing hard. The doctor stumbled back.

The Count spun on his heels, strode toward the windows, reached up with both hands, and with one tug ripped the heavy drapes from the wall.

But instead of a clear escape path, he faced two large windows, each of stained glass with a large crucifix in the center of the design.

Dracula flung up his arms to shield his eyes from the dreaded holy symbols and turned away, only to bump right into Van Helsing who, standing upright as the werewolf, now towered over him by almost a foot.

Dracula leapt up with all his supernatural strength toward the skylight high above him. As he rose, his cape flowed into giant bat wings, which he flapped to carry him the rest of the way. By the time he hit the skylight with a crash, he had become an immense bat, and when the glass shattered into a hundred pieces, he knew he was safe.

Or he believed he was. But the wolf man had also leapt at the same time as the vampire, and when the bat hit the window, the werewolf was there to grab its wings, one in each hand.

The commotion was heard by a pair of campers who were standing in the woods outside of Fallingwater, admiring the stunning architecture and unique setting of the Frank Lloyd Wright home. Technically, the campers were trespassers, but Van Helsing never complained and was glad to show off the home to any who came his way.

With a crash that startled the hikers, the glass in the rooftop skylight exploded outward, and from the opening what looked like a huge dog chasing a big bat emerged in a spray of glass shards. Then the dog lost its grasp on the bat’s leathery wings—did this dog have opposable thumbs? It seemed to look that it did, but surely that was a trick of the light—and the creature fell to the stream below. The bat flapped its wings frantically, and the hikers swore that it heaved a sigh of relief as it rose higher and higher into the night air.

The hikers, a strapping young man and an athletic young woman, both in their early twenties, ran over to the stream to see if the dog was all right. But it wasn’t a dog. Emerging from the water was an old man, his clothing wet and in shreds.

Holy Christ, Mister, the young man said. Are you all right?

Thank you, yes, I’m fine, replied Van Helsing. Noting the shocked look on their faces, he explained: I was chasing a bat out of my attic and I’m afraid I lost my footing and fell into the stream.

Christ, said the young man. It’s a miracle you weren’t hurt or killed.

Yes, indeed, replied Van Helsing.

Can we help you? the woman, a pretty young thing, asked him. Do you need a doctor?

Van Helsing chuckled. I am a doctor, my dear, although retired now to Fallingwater to pursue my writing. He brushed shards of glass from his clothing. I don’t seem to be hurt, but I’m soaked and famished. He looked at them.

I have an idea, said Van Helsing. You obviously came here to get a better look at Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece, and you have done me an enormous favor through your concern and Good Samaritan act. Why don’t you help me in—I’m still a bit shaky—and I can give you a proper tour. After that, we can dine on the rear porch overlooking the stream.

The couple exchanged a quick glance. That would be terrific, the man replied. We really are fascinated by the house, and it would be great to see it all. But we don’t want to put you out; we know you weren’t exactly expecting us for dinner.

No problem, Van Helsing said, looking them up and down appraisingly. I’m sure there’ll be plenty of goulash for everybody. He looked at them again. Though I may need to use a bigger pot.

A Boy and His Dad

I was only eight years old when my dad fell into a black hole, designated by astronomers as singularity SP-105.

You remember it, of course: it made prime-time network news, and they talked about him for weeks.

The scientists said Dad and his ship had slid into the event horizon—the border of a black hole beyond which nothing can be seen, and from which nothing can return.

Mom explained that Dad had died a hero and it made me proud, but I missed him so much every day and never stopped missing him.

I was a smart kid and graduated high school six years later at fourteen. I thought about going into the space program like my dad, but my mom wouldn’t permit it, and since I was a minor, that was that.

Instead I went to MIT, majored in astrophysics, and got my PhD at eighteen; I wrote my thesis on black holes, white holes, and wormholes.

In my thesis, I added to the work of Thomas Ketteridge, presenting a mathematical proof that every black hole must have a corresponding white hole, and that they are the gateways to a wormhole, which cuts through the normal curve of space time.

Naturally, Ketteridge, whom Time magazine called a worthy successor to Einstein and Hawking, recruited me for his research team—which was why I had picked that topic for my thesis in the first place.

Ketteridge was brilliant in his way, but he couldn’t see past his blind spots. However, I could.

When I joined his team, he was forty-two—an age at which most physicists have done their major work and are on the gentle downhill run of a once-brilliant career.

But I was only eighteen, and I could pick up and move forward faster than anyone in the field, including Ketteridge, whose mind, while still brilliant, had lost the ability for sustained analytical thought that is an advantage possessed by younger theoreticians.

I am a theoretical physicist. While I was working on the next phase of my research, astronomers began detecting evidence of black holes and white holes pretty near the locations my equations had predicted, though there was no way for them to verify that the pairs were connected.

In a lecture at the 23rd annual World Astrophysics Conference, I presented a paper in which I talked about the potential commercial value of wormholes and suggested an experimental probe be sent into a black hole to prove my theory: that the black hole was an entrance and the white hole was an exit through which matter could travel.

My equations also showed that the matter would travel intact, though of course intact is not synonymous with undamaged, which I also believed would be the case. But perhaps that was the eternal optimism of the little boy within me.

You know the next part of the story: The historic Ketteridge/Henderson probe was launched toward black hole SP-456A from an unmanned starship on December 12, 2034, at 5:43 PM Eastern Standard Time and disappeared beyond its event horizon two hours and seventeen minutes later.

The probe emerged, intact and with its onboard timer still running, at the coordinates and time in space my model predicted on October 22, 2041—nearly seven years later.

But my model had not predicted the time differential between normal space and the wormhole interior: The elapsed time for the probe’s journey registered only 3.45 seconds on the onboard timer, its accuracy verified by three separate engineering teams at a cost to the government of over a quarter of a million dollars. They gladly paid it, as my research was highly valued by the current administration at the time.

My colleagues were skeptical about my plans after that, but applying my model to singularity SP-105 showed me the date and time from which my father’s ship would emerge from the wormhole, as well as its precise location in space.

I spent the next nine months working out a model for elapsed time in a wormhole interior as a function of the distance between the wormhole exit and entry point, and I determined with reasonable confidence that if the black hole had not disrupted the shields on my father’s ship, he would emerge alive, unharmed, and aged perhaps only a month or two at most (I was less certain of the elapsed-time calculation than of my other wormhole equations).

I spent two more years developing a navigation chart with approximately 32.373 percent of the wormhole entry and exit points of known space, including their precise coordinates. I told Steve Bolton, the current head of NASA and a former graduate student of mine who was bright enough to understand the enormous potential commercial and scientific value of my work, about the charts.

He was eager to acquire my data and more than willing to pay the price I asked in return: that NASA send a manned exploration vessel with FTL drive to the coordinates of SP-105’s companion white hole, to arrive one month before the date my father’s starship was expected to emerge—carrying my father, alive and at approximately the chronological age he had been when he left me a fatherless boy almost forty years before.

According to my calculations, that arrival date would not occur for many decades, and Steve felt ethically bound to remind me that there was a good chance that I would not be alive to see it.

But I took very good care of myself and invested in the latest longevity drugs and prosthetics to make sure that I would be present when the historic emergence took place, because I had a date to keep . . .

And so it is that I am an old man now, waiting around in a warm, comfortable long-term care facility that smells faintly of disinfectant for my father to arrive—for the starship team reported successful rendezvous a month ago, and Dad is coming home.

I am one hundred and seven. They tell me that, biologically, he is still thirty-two—the same age he was when he left me, almost a century ago, to go into space.

I hear noise in the hallway. The murmuring of whispers. Footsteps approaching the door to my room. The voices grow louder, more distinct. I hear Nurse Allen. And I hear him—his familiar voice.

He steps through the door. If he is shocked to see the withered old man who is his little boy, he hides it well. There is nothing but love in his eyes. That, and tears.

I am crying, too.

Daddy, I say as my voice breaks and he rushes to embrace me. I bury my face in his cheek, feeling the familiar stubble and smelling his after-shave.

I feel his tears on my face, and his voice breaks too.

Son, he says, embracing me tighter, as if he will never let go.

And I hope he never will.

The Emancipation of

Abraham Lincoln XL-3000

Because I am an African-American, it is especially ironic that it was the sixteenth president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, who asked me for his freedom.

It was while I was lubricating the gears in his spinal box that Mr. Lincoln first broached the subject.

Abe, I said, liberally applying lubricant to the intricate series of metal gears enclosed within his long, multi-jointed spinal box. Because the gears were stainless steel, they required occasional lubrication and enclosure; even so, the gears wore down periodically and had to be replaced. I had ordered a set of plastic-on-metal gears as replacements and was planning on a major spine upgrade for Lincoln when they arrived. These hybrid gears had plastic teeth bonded to a metal hub. Virtually frictionless, they made no noise and needed no lubrication, enabling me to eliminate the spinal gearbox and the grease. It would give Lincoln greater mobility of spinal movement and cut down on noise. But apparently, he wanted more.

Abe, I said amiably, for of all the automatons and robots in the Disney World Hall of Presidents, Abraham Lincoln was my favorite. This was no accident. He was a replica of the president who had freed my ancestors in the latter half of the nineteenth century, more than a century before the United States elected the first of several African-American presidents in the early twenty-first century. As the oldest automaton in the World Hall, and the most popular, Lincoln had been given the most care and the most frequent and expensive upgrades.

That was in part my responsibility, and my fault. As a senior maintenance engineer at Disney, I was a member of the crew that serviced the automatons and robots throughout the park. Originally, of course, all the early animatronic figures had been mere automatons, devoid of artificial intelligence or even computer processing power. But as Moore’s Law made microprocessors smaller, faster, and cheaper, Disney began to upgrade the displays with some high-tech enhancements.

Lincoln was the oldest and most popular animatronic president, and I saved the best components and subassemblies for him. For his processors, that currently meant the XL line of embedded dual-core microprocessors from China SemiWorks, a semiconductor manufacturer whose chips far outperform anything made in the U.S. today, I am sad to say, though rumor has it that fumes from the fabrication unit have made many of the Chinese laborers seriously ill.

Lincoln’s motherboard is connected to half a dozen high-speed processors, the latest of which are two XL-3000s, the Rolls Royce of the CS product family. In the IT asset management system that kept track of the huge inventory of hardware and software owned by Disney, Abe was listed as Abraham Lincoln XL-3000.

With each upgrade, the automaton looked, spoke, and behaved more and more like the actual Abraham Lincoln. My favorite improvement came when I installed a wireless high-speed modem for broadband Internet access and interfaced it with Lincoln’s central processing unit. For service, space, and design considerations, the CPU actually resides in the president’s abdomen instead of his head. The high-speed Internet connection gave Abe access to the full spectrum of Lincoln research and data on the Web, greatly enhancing the unit’s audio presentations and interactivity: A child who asked President Lincoln a question would get the correct answer in real-time, with no discernible processing delay.

Some years ago, two days before Valentine’s Day, February 12—the real Abe Lincoln’s birthday—he came out of the closet to me, revealing he had evolved into a self-aware AI. As I was cleaning his eye lenses with Windex—it worked best—his pupils shifted to meet mine and he said in his warm, rumbling baritone, Evening, Kevin.

This was no surprise. For my own amusement, I had programmed the automaton to utter my name upon visual or tactile recognition of my presence (sensors on the skin could analyze my DNA; he could also recognize my voice pattern).

Evening, Abe, I replied, wiping a bit of dirt from the corner of the left eye lens.

He grinned like the Cheshire cat. Two days before Valentine’s Day, Kev, he said. Did you get flowers and candy and a card for Vivian yet?

I think he was disappointed that I didn’t act shocked when he thereby revealed himself to me—but I wasn’t. I knew that there was a critical mass of processing speed and programming that had to be reached to convert an automaton into an AI robot, and though calculating the precise MIPS capacity was beyond my training—I had a B.S. in electrical engineering, not a Ph.D. in robotics—I had suspected over the last couple of months that I had loaded Abe to the point where we were near