… Of these buildings, we managed only to explore the larger chambers, and even then, only those that served as entries. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the shapes and sizes of the doors in between rooms and tiers, as though access between levels was restricted according to the size and shape of those who once lived here.

James, however, is resolute in his notion that our ancient hosts have neither a set shape or size, citing the absence of ladders or stairs between the floors of these strange towers.

Of course this is nonsense. The large amount of human skeletons we have found here, indicate that these strange and seemingly pointless chambers must have been purely decorative, or of some significance to whatever primitive religions or superstitions they practiced.

We’ve counted, documented, and graded what seem to be thousands of years worth of human remains now. For all the varying ages of the bones, and for all the time this settlement was here, it is strange to find the builders of this mysterious city had but twenty or less members at any given time… leading all the way up to only ten or less years ago.

… Is that an octopus? …here?

Share This

Morgan Booth looked up at a stretch of wide blue sky and waited for the miracle to happen. With the winds kicking up, little dust devils tumbled across the plains and scoured the land. Standing on the edge of town, Booth found himself surrounded by a sizable crowd of townsfolk. Their mood struck him as electric, like the static carried on dry winds that sometimes threw blue sparks off wire fences at night. That’s how it was with the people. They had an excited air about them. He could see a few had even gone so far as to throw coarse blankets down on the bare ground. Families tucked into their picnic dinners and children played in what used to be fertile soil now gone to lifeless powder.

This town was just the latest in a string of used up little communities he’d wandered into and out of again over the past few months. The past few summers had seen withered crops and wasted stock across much of the rolling countryside out west of the Big Muddy. In his gut Booth knew a lot of places wouldn’t make it past another winter. Even at the tender age of nineteen those towns tended to rattle him. They were too full of empty houses and empty fields that had dried up. Wheat, corn, cattle, and sometimes even the people went to dust and blew away. The town, he decided, felt like death and he avoided them whenever he could.

Today though, Booth saw the crowd of townsfolk out milling around and it raised his curiosity. Arriving on the coach an hour earlier, he’d made a point of finding what few stores lined the main street. There wasn’t much to see, and his hopes of finding work weren’t great. He walked from one end of the street to the other in the space of five minutes and that’s when he saw all the people. Ambling over, he quickly learned the reason for all the fuss. It was a man standing atop a wagon the likes of which Booth had never quite seen before.

The handbill pasted across the wagon’s side proclaimed the man to be a rain-maker. The crazy looking collection of kettles, copper drums, and India-rubber tubes in his wagon was apparently a ‘patented gas generator’. Dressed as he was in dusty spats, a powder white frock coat, and matching white top hat of the old John Bull variety, he looked to be an eastern dandy, a snake oil man, or both.

Still, as ridiculous as he appeared, Booth did find the man’s machinery to be rather fascinating. The contraption mounted on the back of the old casket wagon hissed and rumbled as though it contained some sort of mythical beast. At intervals, little release valves sprung open and green vapor shot out. By the way they oohed and ahhed, the children seemed to think it was a regular Fourth-of-July.

Calling the crowd to attention, the rain-maker clapped his hands together. Then speaking in a clear, high voice, he said, “May I have your attention please? Attention please? I want to thank you good folk for coming out here on as God-awful a day as any I’ve seen. It warms my heart to know that so many of you have seen fit to place your faith in the science of man whereas too many have seen fit to throw their lot in with devilish powers or to give up entirely.”

Gesturing at the equipment in his wagon, he continued, “This lovely device, my friends, is the cornerstone of the artificial production of rain in our time! With it, I can create an exotic mixture of rare gases, leiden-jars, and wet batteries, all of which are neatly packed into the bodies of my patented paper-rockets. That’s right – paper-rockets. Why paper? Because it is light! Don’t you fret though, once the tubes have been stiffened by successive coats of varnish and paraffin, I can assure you that they are as tough and durable as an elephant’s knees.”

Turning, Booth saw the rockets staked out in a line just a little ways from the wagon. Each one stood about as tall as a man and all were attached to long wooden rods. The rain-maker paused for a moment and then spoke again. “These explosive devices, first pioneered by inscrutable Chinese artisans in the Far East, will be used to establish an electrical communion with the clouds above. The volatile gases contained within each of my rockets are charged with voltaic energy and, when properly exploded, will chill the very atmosphere resulting in condensation – rain, my friends! Rain! My miraculous generator here is large enough to produce some two hundred gallons of rain-making gas per hour, or the rough equivalent of twenty rockets.”

Booth shook his head in wonder. It was all a bit beyond him, but he had to admit that the fast talking rain-maker certainly had his patter down. From the looks of the people around him, the townsfolk were more than ready to buy his bill of goods.

Booth shook his head again and dug into his trouser pocket for the dollar coin he had. A hot meal seemed like a good idea, and he was about to walk away when someone asked him, “You here for the show, boy?”

Surprised by the question, he turned to see a wizened figure in tattered overalls and worn pair of old miner’s boots. Both man and boots were the dull color of road dust.

“Just passing through, mister” Booth answered slowly. “Though I must admit to some curiosity. You folks do this kind of thing regularly?” he said, thrusting a thumb in the general direction of the rain-maker.

The old man laughed, and it sounded to Booth like the braying of a water parched donkey. “That fool,” he cackled, “is always trying out some new fangled contraption or other. Got a powerful yearnin’ for the sciences.”

Tilting the brim of his hat up and scratching the side of his head with a ragged fingernail, Booth gave a kind of noncommittal grunt. Though there was no particular reason for it, he felt compelled to speak out on the rain-maker’s behalf. Maybe it was his own rebellious nature or maybe it was just his general sense of fair play. “Well now,” he said after a moment’s reflection, “I suppose a man is entitled to investigate the mysteries of the Lord’s creation as best as he sees fit. Don’t you think so?”

This elicited another burst of laughter. “Hoo-wah, yes-sirree! Best entertainment in town, boy. A couple of years back it were casting lightning bolts, if’n you can believe such a thing. Lightning!”

A little surprised at the revelation, Booth looked back at the rain-maker. “You don’t say? Well now, I suppose I have heard tell that Northern men can do such things.”

For a third time the old man laughed and the sound of it was setting Booth’s teeth on edge. “Oh now,” the old timer said once the guffaw’s subsided, “I’ve heard the same, son. The difference being, that feller over there won’t have no truck with witchcraft of any kind. It’s science or nothing at all with him. Damn fool’s as stubborn as they come.”

Though he’d rarely seen it for himself, Booth did know a little about the practice of witchcraft, or craft as it was more commonly known. And while it wasn’t as common in the States as it was up in the North, there were still plenty of practitioners and believers throughout the Union. Booth started reevaluating his first opinion of the rain-maker. Maybe, he thought, I was a just a little too quick to judge.

Leaving the old man behind, Booth crossed over to the wagon and, in an appreciative tone, said, “That is a fine rig you have there, sir.”

The rain-maker didn’t turn around. Rather, he spoke over his shoulder with bubbling excitement in his voice. “Why thank you, young man. It’s one of a kind and easily without peer or equal in these parts, but not for long. Oh no, mark my words, lad. Soon drought will be a thing of the past. My system will see to that!”

Booth nodded at the man’s back-side. “A fine sentiment, and it’s surely to your credit. My name is Morgan Booth by the way.”

At last, the man turned. After rubbing his hands with an oily rag he extended one in a polite greeting. “Hostlebeck, sir. Edwin P. Hostlebeck to be exact: amateur pluviculturalist, voltaic entrepreneur, and general man of the scientific arts. And what,” he said, grinning broadly, “would be your line, my young friend?”

Shrugging, Booth said, “Not much of anything just at present.”

Hostlebeck looked him up and down for a long moment and Booth imagined what the rain-maker saw. He figured it was what everyone seemed to see at first glance: a callow youth in a battered hat with an old army-gunbelt slung over his narrow hips. Combined with a forgettable face, he was easily overlooked in a crowd. Rarely, if ever, did anyone manage to see past Booth’s skin to the depths beneath. Hostlebeck though, must have caught some glimpse of those undercurrents, for he eventually said, “Have you ever worked as a cloud-buster, my young friend?”

Booth wasn’t entirely certain what a ‘cloud-buster’ was, but he figured it probably had something to do with the art of rain-making. “I cannot say I’ve had the pleasure, though I have handled rockets before.” The last he said with a gesture toward the ones Hostlebeck already had staked out in the pasture.

The rain-maker’s eyebrows shot up. “Is that so? May I inquire as to how you gained such experience? I beg your pardon, but you seem a trifle young to be acquainted with these devices.”

Nodding to show he was not offended by the question, Booth said, “I was a scout for Colonel Beatty. He had under him a troop of rocketeers at the Battle of Big Nemaha River right there at the end of the war.”

Hostlebeck nodded soberly. “Ah yes. Those would have been the older Congreve style of rockets. Primitive but revolutionary in their own right. Mine,” he said with a grand sweep of his arm, “are of a unique design, though in principle quite similar.”

Share This

There I stood, alone, amidst the crowd, looking over a rather broken man, who was gasping in pain, clutching at his own hideously twisted form.

“Just what does being from Cincinnati have to do with medical emergencies?” huffed she, a rather pointy-faced old lady, who by the tone of her voice, and the sheer stupidity of her question, was obviously from Toledo.

“Well,” I said ”Cincinnati is 683 feet above sea level, and 31 miles from the ocean, which of course makes me the anti-christ.”

“And who better to save the life of this poor man than one with such awesome and incredible powers of deduction as I?”, I added, peering around the innards of the fast-falling machine – looking for makeshift tools to do the job at hand.

There was little time remaining; The injured man’s leg was bleeding profusely all over the fine low-pile cobalt-blue carpet, his bones jutting awkwardly outward like the eyes of a strangled Cambodian prostitute.

“I will have to do a tracheotomy” I shouted, reaching my clutching hand empty towards the crowd. “I will need something very heavy”.

“Like your suitcase perhaps?” interrupted a rather interrupty and daft fellow with a manged and mangled weasel for an upper lip. “Your suitcase that fell and broke the man’s leg, shortly after smashing the brains of the stewardess on its way down from the rack?”

“That one?” he added, as if I did not know what my suitcase looked like. ”What is in that thing anyway, that it is so heavy?” he questioned, his mustache growing bigger and bigger with every dumb word.

“Well, what is the one substance on earth that could make something so small, so heavy?” I asked him, in a deservingly sarcastic and condescending tone. And since he was too poorly dressed to answer in a timely fashion, I answered for him: ”Why bowling balls of course, cunningly crushed into tiny little pieces! Any idiot would know there is not a case or bag out there which will fit whole bowling balls in the overhead compartment these days! BEHOLD! The powers of deduction!”

“Who would crush bowling balls just to bring them on board an aerocraft?”, he asked, as if he had completely missed the entire preceeding paragraph. I would have been embarrassed for him, were he not German.

“This is exactly why I am in charge! ‘Further demonstrated by my uncanny ability to deduce precisely what was in this bag!”, I remarked, holding the suitcase high above my head with surgical precision.

I then leaned attractively over the dying man, hammering and hammering at his throat with my suitcase, again and again – but it was too late; He expired soon after, despite my brave and dashing actions. I was just too late.

Off I ventured into the cargo bay with my loud and panicked admirers hounding my every step, and clutching at my fine wool jacket; This, perhaps in the all-too-common hopes that its swatches would heal their vapors or perhaps help their crops to grow.

Having no time for their foolish superstitions, I closed the cargo door behind me, and locked it; Saving these passengers was my job and my job alone, and I could not let myself be distracted or slowed by their screaming ways.

I grabbed a parachute from the wall, opened the hatch, and I was off. With luck, I would return with help before their situation became any worse.

I just had to try.

Share This