Kzine Issue 17 Read online

  KZINE MAGAZINE

  Issue 17

  Edited by Graeme Hurry

  Kzine Issue 17 © January 2017 by Kimota Publishing

  cover © Dave Windett, 2016

  Beyond Baltic © Brian M. Milton, 2017

  Elizabeth Loved The Rain © Jackie Neel, 2017

  Flesh © Gary J. Hurtubise, 2017

  The Rainbow © Kenneth O’Brien, 2017

  The Winning Team © Craig McEwan, 2017

  Disaster Adjuster © Peter DiChellis, 2017

  The Price of Healing © Kristin Janz, 2017

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of the copyright holder. For editorial content this is Graeme Hurry, for stories it is the individual author, for artwork it is the artist.

  CONTENTS

  BEYOND BALTIC by Brian M. Milton (7)

  ELIZABETH LOVED THE RAIN by Jackie Neel (8)

  FLESH by Gary J Hurtubise (22)

  THE RAINBOW by Kenneth O’Brien (9)

  THE WINNING TEAM by Craig McEwan (3)

  DISASTER ADJUSTER by Peter DiChellis (6)

  THE PRICE OF HEALING by Kristin Janz (21)

  Contributor Notes

  The number in brackets indicates the approximate printed page length of the story.

  BEYOND BALTIC

  by Brian M. Milton

  Just because a monument does not look impressive does not mean it is powerless. I learned that when I was just twelve and have never taken a standing stone lightly since.

  In the town of Darvel where I grew up was the Dagon Stone. The Dagon Stone was a pillar of rock with a round ‘head’ attached by a metal bar and was the source of many local legends and myths. Stories of witches, fairies and traditions of processing round it on your wedding day clung to this stone despite it being nothing much to look at. In actual fact, it had been dug up when the road was widened in the nineteenth century and most people assumed that it was nothing special. It was many years after the incident that I discovered Lovecraft used the name but he certainly didn’t get it right.

  It began as a standard Scottish damp and dreary autumn before turning into a bitterly cold and wet Christmas and then, not long after we’d all returned to school, it snowed on a Tuesday morning. I woke and opened the curtains to see the wind whipping along the street, blowing fine white particles before it. The snow twisted, twirled and gusted down, up and around. The wind bounced from the thick sandstone walls of the Co-Op buildings opposite and rattled my window frame. Looking out I could see the people who were heading to work at the Lace Mills being buffeted back and forth as they made their way through the grey-white gloom, wrapped up and shivering as they walked.

  Before breakfast it was my job to collect the morning rolls from the baker. I battled across the road and into the shop, stamping slush from my feet on their mat. The woman behind the counter, Mrs. Morton, knew my parents well, as they worked just across the road and she had even worked in the local amateur dramatic society with my dad for the last four years but none the less this did not stop her from shouting “The rolls fur the new lot frae the Post Office” into the back of the shop. We were incomers and that was something no one in the town was going to forget. To not have family ties dating back over one hundred years marked you out in the Loudoun Valley. I paid for the rolls and dashed back across the road, trying to shield the brown paper bag from the howling gale and staggered, dripping and shivering back into the flat.

  My mother made porridge for breakfast which I gobbled down, trying to build a warm core at my centre, before I picked up my bag and left for the short walk to the square where I could catch the school bus. My secondary school was not in my town, Darvel, but four miles and two towns away outside Galston. It meant that we had to take a council supplied bus and each morning I would have to join the other children in waiting in Hastings Square for it to arrive.

  As soon as I stepped out of the front door onto the Main Street the cold bit. Darvel had a long, straight Main Street, running east to west, with the open square in the centre and when the wind blew it was funnelled down the street, picking up ferocity as it went. The wind howled into my face, briefly blinding me with dancing flakes of snow, and cut straight through my coat. The cold gripped my chest, forcing an involuntary gasp which only caused me to suck in air and feel even colder.

  It was only a hundred yards from my front door to the square but it now felt like a hundred miles of Russian Tundra, wind blasted and permanently frozen. The sort of place where mammoths went to die. I took a deep breath, pulled my coat tight around me and stepped out into the gale once more.

  I staggered the few yards to the Zebra Crossing, blinking snow from my eyes and scurried across as the Lollypop Lady, twice her usual size in multiple jumpers, held up the few cars that had braved the weather that morning. On the far side I turned into the freezing blast and pushed my way through the snow, leaning forward into the wind and hoping no sudden lull would see me flat on my face. The snow rushed into my face, making it almost impossible to see as the world turned into a howling star field with just the occasional glimpse of black tarmac or grey wall to show me the way.

  At the end of this tunnel of rushing white dots was Hastings Square. A standard town square with an old Town Hall and a church on the opposite side. In the centre was the war memorial. On the west side was a bust of Alexander Fleming, discoverer of penicillin and local farm boy, and on the east side was the Dagon Stone and the telephone box.

  I pushed my way into the square and past the red telephone box, now with a group of Fifth Years sheltering behind it. I passed several small huddled groups of children and approached the group for my own year. As I approached one of them looked over his shoulder at me and they suddenly all moved closer to each other, closing off any gaps I could have used to join them. It seemed that even in the teeth of a winter gale the new kid was still not welcome. I saw a second group I knew scraping up snow and compacting it into snowballs but, as I saw them pelt another child with eager evilness, I decided not to go near them. Over the howl and gnash of wind I could just make out the odd snippet of conversation as the kids I passed decided that ‘It wis really chanking oot the day’.

  Ayrshire, and specifically the Loudoun Valley, has its own scale of cold. There was ‘cold’ which was just a blustery day, or perhaps a touch of frost in the morning. Then there was ‘baltic’ which would indicate a hard frost or a biting wind, a day worth wrapping up for. Then there was ‘chanking’. If the weather was chanking it was truly freezing. I moved on to my usual exposed spot and turned to face the Dagon Stone, putting my back to the wind. It was then I noticed the boy.

  Everything else in the square was part obscured by the snow. The telephone box, the other children huddling from the snow, the houses along the side of the square and the road were all jumbles of vague images shifting through the whipping, dancing flakes. But, in front of the stone, leaning nonchalantly against it and facing directly into the gale, was a boy. He looked about my age, with a thin, pinched face, and was wearing full uniform. Grey trousers, black shoes, white shirt, red and grey striped tie, grey pullover jumper and a black blazer. In that howling wind, well beyond Baltic on the Ayrshire Cold Scale, this boy was not wearing a coat. I could tell all this because I could see him clearly. It was as if the snow was keeping away from him. No flakes had settled on his pristine blazer. His hair looked dry and neatly brushed.

  I stared at
the boy for a moment. My senses had been numbed by the wind thumping into my back and the cold air that I was breathing and it took a second for me to understand what was wrong with this picture. How could the weather be so terrible here but not ten feet away?

  Then the boy looked straight at me, grinned and walked over towards me. As he approached the wind dropped and the snow lessened. I felt myself straighten up, not that I got any warmer. If anything the air became even colder, each breath a painful effort, my body rebelling against this loss of heat to something as mundane as breathing.

  The boy walked up to me and looked down at his foot as he scuffed at some snow on the ground, kicking it aside and clearing the surface of the square between us. He then looked up at me and smiled once more. There was no warmth in that smile, more a showing of teeth by someone who had once read that smiles were a useful tool. Then he spoke.

  “Cold, isn’t it?”

  I was stunned. Being snubbed by the other children from school for being new was expected and so anyone talking to me would have been a surprise. But this was another new boy doing it. Had no one explained the rules to him? To just walk up to someone on your first day and talk about the weather was unheard of. My first instinct was to turn away, try to pretend I had not heard. But I knew that wouldn’t work. I had watched him walk over and was staring straight at him. So I went for non-committal.

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  “Is that all you have to say on the matter? A grunt? Have this lot so beaten you down that, even though you know what it’s like to be ignored, you would do it too?”

  “They? What?”

  “Ah, 12 year old boys. Oh so eloquent. I mean these other children. Huddling here in the snow and all ignoring you simply because your grandmother had the temerity not to be born two streets from their grandparents.”

  “I’m, I’m sorry, do I know you?”

  The boy smiled again. “I like to think I could be your friend, Brian. Someone who can help you fight against this terrible ignorance. Would you want that? A friend to talk to in this cold and lonely square? You can call me Jack.”

  I stared at this strange boy. He didn’t talk like any of the other children I went to school with. He was confident, sure of himself. My shyness began to kick in and I almost blushed, the cold ripping the heat from my cheeks before it could build.

  “Come now, Brian. You don’t want to stand here all alone do you? You’re in a square full of children in a town where everyone knows you, wouldn’t you like to have someone who will actually talk to you properly?”

  I nodded, too disturbed to speak. He did have a point though. Why was I singled out in this way? I’d travelled so much more than any of these other people, I’d even lived north of the Clyde for a few years. Wasn’t that supposed to make me more interesting and worth talking to?

  The boy flashed his teeth once more, bright white and somehow too many for a normal child’s mouth. “I knew you’d understand. They’re so dull, never been more than twenty miles in any direction and closed off to anything of interest. The world can be so much greater and so much stranger than they can possibly imagine. But not you. They’re right that you’re different you know? Just not in the narrow, thug-like way that they think. No, you see more. You’ve seen other places and accept that things can be different. That’s why you saw me in the first place.”

  I leaned forward, not used to anything that could be called flattery. The words were kind and encouraging and should have, in the midst of that Arctic blast, warmed me. But they didn’t, the cold only grew worse. I balled my fists into my coat pockets and squeezed them repeatedly, trying to keep the blood flowing to the tips of my fingers as all heat fled from me. I wanted to hear more but some voice at the back of my head was calling that something was not right here. This warning cry pushed its way to the front of my mind and forced a question out of my blue, trembling lips.

  “Who are you? Why are you not cold?”

  “You think this is cold? You do live in such a small temperature range here, I suppose it must seem cold. But I can show you places where entire cities have frozen solid, or places where the rivers boil. Come with me and I’ll show you wonders your brain won’t be able to handle.” He stepped backwards towards the Dagon Stone and I found myself tottering forward after him. The muscles in my legs creaked as if they had frozen solid and strange pains shot up and down my legs. My feet felt as if they stopped just below the ankle, the toes having turned to ice. The warning voice in my head was now getting more insistent, pointing out that it was now colder towards the boy then behind me. His very presence seemed to be sucking any heat from the air.

  “Go where? How?” My throat constricted, my body desperate to not let any heat escape and I tottered forward again as the boy grinned at me and laid his hand upon the ancient stone. To my shock it began to glow a soft blue-white as the snow, still howling around every part of the square except where we stood, slowly parted like a curtain around the glowing stone. Beyond the stone was grass, pale green under a layer of frost but getting greener and warmer the further from the stone I looked. Small gusts of snow crept round the edge of the curtain and drifted onto the grass.

  The boy stepped across the threshold and his shiny leather school shoes sunk into the turf where, only moments before, I could only see hard flagstones and drifting snow. He held out his hand. “Come now. It’s been a long time since I took someone on an adventure, all the iron you humans use in the world makes it harder to open the portal these days.”

  I tottered forward several more steps to the edge of the curtain. Beneath my shoes was scuffed snow over grey paving but only inches away was grass. Behind the boy a thick wood stretched off. To my left was the telephone box, looking just as solid as the trees in front of me, but it was getting covered in snow and why were the children sheltering behind it not looking at this wood? They seemed completely oblivious. I hesitated. I agreed with so much he had said, I was different, the other children were stupid, insular idiots who didn’t understand me. I’d always wanted to travel, see the wonders of the world and here was one right now. But the voice in the back of my head that had made me ask those earlier questions continued to scream at me. “Don’t do it. Listen to what he’s saying. This isn’t normal, he isn’t normal”

  I stood on the threshold as the boy, his smile fixed on his face like a party mask, held out his hand. I really wanted someone to talk to, a real friend, someone who understood what it was to be lonely. Then I looked into his eyes. Blazing bright green they glinted with disdain and humour. I suddenly realised that he was finding this funny. He was mocking me, stuck there between my desire and my fear. It wasn’t a smile on his face, it was a sneer.

  I reeled for a second, unsure what to do, then, every muscle screaming with the cold, I bent down, forced my hands out of my pockets and into the snow at my feet and scooped up a snowball. I compressed it, pulled back my arm and threw it with all my might at the boy as his face changed. His ears lengthened to points and his mouth grew into a huge maw of tiny, sharp teeth screaming out in terrible anger.

  “How dare you defy me! Generations of human children have been my playthings and you are no better.”

  The snowball flew up and out, my terrible throw missing the boy entirely and sailing past him through the portal. The boy took a step forward as the snowball reached the threshold between the worlds and suddenly disappeared, along with the wood, as the wind snapped back in.

  My eyes blurred and re-focussed to see the square looking perfectly normal. Children huddled from the wind, snow blew around and piled onto the ground, the Dagon Stone looked exactly as dull as it always had and a snowball slowly arced back out of the sky, landing plum onto the windscreen of a car driving on the far side of the road.

  The car screeched to a halt and a man jumped out, his work shirt instantly darkening with water in the driving snow and shouted at the assembled children on the square. “Who the hell threw that? There was a nail or something in it, nearly broke my win
dow!”

  For a second the children in the square all looked surprised at the shouting man but then, before he could keep shouting or anyone could think of an answer, the school bus arrived and I was suddenly engulfed in a tide of gloriously warm bodies rushing forward.

  ELIZABETH LOVED THE RAIN

  by Jackie Neel

  August had brought only hot winds tearing at the topsoil, but on the first of September, Elizabeth woke up with a tingle in her spine.

  Preparing breakfast, she sang along with the radio to a ninety’s pop song she was surprised she remembered. Even the dance move that had been so popular at homecoming came to mind.

  “What’s with you?” her teenage daughter Eleanor asked around a mouthful of microwaved sausage.

  “What?”

  “You’re acting strange. And you’re not wearing a Slayer t-shirt and ripped jeans.”

  “Can’t I be in a good mood?”

  “Do you have a date or something?”

  “Eat your breakfast, Elmo.”

  On the drive home, after dropping Elmo of at school, Elizabeth could see the thunderhead in the west. Her heart skipped a beat. She pulled into the drive and ran to the door before a tilting wind.

  She took ten minutes deciding whether perfume made any sense, then opted for the lightly floral Iridescence.

  She pulled the old deck chair from the shed, filing away again that she needed to have the rickety structure reframed. The deck chair was nearly as old, with green and white plastic weave supported on a stainless steel frame that could ratchet into position. She took care to not let one of the foot bars slide out as she set it up, since its linchpin had long since been lost. She laid it out in a flat depression of the back yard, carefully screened from the road and her distant neighbors by seven-foot privacy fences.

  She pulled out a silk sleeping mask, one with tight elastic, and pulled it down over her eyes.