Twelve O'Clock Tales Read online

  Synopsis

  Twelve O’Clock Tales is the fourth collection of short fiction by legendary novelist and memoirist, Felice Picano (The Lure, Like People in History, True Stories). A personal homage to the storytellers of his youth, Edgar Allen Poe, E.F. Benson, and H. P. Lovecraft, as well as his acquaintances, Arthur C. Clarke and Harlan Ellison. Eleven dark tales, eerie, bizarre, and dreamlike, the tales will thrill and disturb, discomfort and titillate, enthrall and leave you wondering. Picano ranges across time and space, from tribal West Africa to the American heartland, to a lab in Venezuela, and a California Highway fifteen years from now. His characters range from a teen accident survivor with a secret, to a far-future scholar forced to travel to a galactic backwater, to a retired L.A. cop who dabbles in astrology, and a peasant girl in B.C.E. Israel encountering the strangest of strangers. The thirteen tales include brand new stories and acknowledged Picano masterworks collected here for the first time.

  Twelve O’Clock Tales

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  Twelve O’Clock Tales

  © 2012 By Felice Picano. All Rights Reserved.

  ISBN 13: 978-1-60282-699-1

  This Electronic Book is published by

  Bold Strokes Books, Inc.

  P.O. Box 249

  Valley Falls, New York 12185

  First Edition: April 2012

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  Credits

  Editor: Stacia Seaman

  Production Design: Stacia Seaman

  Cover Design By Sheri ([email protected])

  Also available from Bold Strokes

  The Lure

  Late in the Season

  Looking Glass Lives

  Contemporary Gay Romances:

  Tragic, Mystic, Comic & Horrific

  Dedication

  for Ross Crowe

  with thanks to Harlan Ellison—who doesn’t want any

  and in memory of Arthur C. Clarke

  Preface

  In a way, this book is one that I’ve been writing for many years.

  My family is from Rhode Island, and the city of Providence is surprisingly rich for being the residence of masters of supernatural fiction—among them Edgar Allen Poe and H.P. Lovecraft. My much older Aunt Lillian and Uncle Bert lived midway between the residences of both men, and they knew the latter author briefly in his last years. Whenever I stayed with them during childhood summers in the early 1950s I would read volumes of both authors’ works, both at their home and at the local library on College Hill.

  Poe of course is a classic, although in truth he is rather spottily known. Some of his best work is not the half dozen poems and tales he’s known by, but instead longer works like “The Gold-Bug,” “The Unparalleled Adventures of One Hans Pfaal,” and the utterly mad The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Those were the tales that stuck with me, and rereading them recently proved them to be wonderfully subversive and gaga.

  Unlike today, at that time, Lovecraft had virtually no reputation as a writer outside of faithful readers of Weird Tales magazine in the 1920s and 1930s. That he does today is partly thanks to the staunch and persistent efforts of Arkham House in Sauk City, Michigan, which reprinted everything, even the poetry, in editions usually limited to a few thousand copies. But also thanks to the San Francisco Hippie Rock group H.P. Lovecraft and their eerie hit song “The White Ship.”

  Today his books are fittingly part of the huge Library of America series. Rereading them, I’m always surprised how fittingly he uses the odd geography of Rhode Island—half-water, half-land; and of the latter, half-city and half-rural—in his stories and novels. At that time, however, most of Lovecraft’s titles were out of print and unobtainable. By the way, a handful of movies were made out of Lovecraft’s works in the 1970s based on his books, too. Most are odd and bad, but some are very surprisingly true to the source and even watchable.

  Later in life, once I was writing fiction myself, I was fortunate enough to come into contact with two master authors of Science Fiction, Arthur C. Clarke and Harlan Ellison. Individually, and entirely unprompted, they reviewed my books, praised them, and encouraged me—and so unwittingly they set me on the path that would end up at this volume, and with my sci-fi trilogy City on a Star still being written.

  In a way Twelve O’Clock Tales is an homage to those unique and astonishing talents: Poe, Lovecraft, Clarke, and Ellison. As well as to M.R. James, Walter de La Mare, Ambrose Bierce, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edith Wharton, Henry James, Saki, Algernon Blackwood, etc., all of whom I’ve read and still read today.

  For people who keep track of things, Twelve O’Clock Tales is my fourth collection of short stories, following Slashed To Ribbons in Defense of Love in 1983 (reprinted as The New York Years in 2003), Tales From a Distant Planet in 2005, and Contemporary Gay Romances in 2011 (also Bold Strokes Books). The 2005 title was published by French Connection Press in Paris, France, and had a very limited distribution, although the book is still available for sale in the U.S., and I’m including two of its most praised stories here.

  Although I am primarily known as a novelist (and lately also as a memoirist), stories are my favorite way of writing fiction, whether it is a 1,750 word “amusement in prose” (the second story here), a 35,000 word novella, or anything in between.

  When I can know, sense, or even merely get a hint about an ending while I’m writing, I think I’m simply a better writer, certainly a tighter one. Doing that with a novel usually means a five- to ten-year period of gestation before I even begin, and equal years of commitment on the other end. With stories I can start and end in a few sessions, or in the case of longer works, do so within a month. Any more time than that and it becomes something else.

  My first story was written when I was twelve, and my first published story (collected in Slashed to Ribbons) was written as far back as 1972. I’ve now written almost fifty shorter stories, of which (with this volume) now forty-seven have been published in one form, format, place or another, from magazines and newspapers to anthologies to online magazines. Very early on I wrote “strange” stories: My second “finished, adult” story, in fact, could have easily fit into this collection.

  Among the stories here, a few included here were popular: “Absolute Ebony” has been published several times in mainstream magazines and other people’s collections, ditto with “Spices of the World” and “One Way Out,” and it’s amazing that readers find them fresh and relevant. Another tale, “Love and the She-Lion,” was second runner-up as “story of the year” for the late, lamented Story magazine.

  The other tales are recently written, from 1995 to 2011, and brand new. Most of the stories here are strange, a few comical, and others rather sinister. They came from different places and times—a Hebrew backwater in B.C.E. Israel; a California highway some fifteen years from now; an unnamed New England rural area, time unknown; East London around 1950; New York City, etc., in as far as I can determine the 1970s. Other places are difficult to determine: the Midwest for two of them; for one, the British Midlands. One takes place in Venezuela, a country I’ve never visited, was never in any way interested in, and maybe thought of a total of three times in my li
fe.

  Reviewing my recent nonfiction collection, True Stories: Portraits from My Past, Thom Nickels pointed out that among those relationships were several which dealt with experiences that cannot be explained, and that I dealt with them as objectively and honestly as I could. He was surprised, saying it’s seldom done and mostly frowned upon in “literature.”

  Since I—and people around me—have actually had such unexplainable experiences, I believe they are valid loci and foci for writing as well as discussion. Anyone who denies to my face that the “unseen world is all around us” is usually met with a laugh—if not a giggle—I know better. And the more it is written of and discussed, the less it will be demonized; the more it might be understood.

  Unfazed, my intrepid publisher, Bold Strokes Press, has issued Twelve O’Clock Tales, so named because around midnight is when I sat down to write most of the tales, and it’s a good time for you to read them too…Boo!

  Felice Picano

  Synapse

  “So, Annette…Do you mind if I call you Annette? I mean we can’t keep up this dopey fiction of ‘Mom’ and ‘Son’ anymore, can we?”

  She stared at me across the table, so I went on.

  “You keep asking the questions. So now I’ll tell you.”

  There was a new look, of panic, on her face. But I went on anyway.

  “You see, unlike your husband Mike or your son Lyons, you do keep asking the questions. And they’re the right questions, Annette. They really are. For example, who is this kid sitting at your kitchen table? You know I’m not your son, Scotty Alcock, aged fourteen. You’ve known that for a while now, haven’t you? Even though that’s exactly who I look like and sound like.”

  A sob escaped her, and she quickly closed it back with a hand. Her eyes were an odd mixture of fear and desire. Desire to know—and now!

  “Not when I first showed up in the hospital, maybe. And maybe not even when I first came home. But soon after. Right?”

  She shook her head, and I knew she meant yes, even if it looked like no.

  “Then the books. The computers. The kids coming by from school. None of Scotty’s old friends. None of those losers! Not the ones who left him to die, alone, hanging out of that car that they crashed and left him to die in.”

  Another sob that she caught just in time.

  “No, instead, the new school friends. The smart ones. The good-looking ones. The ones going somewhere in life. And then the school itself. Those amazing report cards. Those stunning grades on those papers. Those teacher-parent meetings. Mike was sure it was a miraculous change. But you knew Scotty better than Mike, didn’t you, Annette? You knew he’d never be that bright, didn’t you? Never be that capable of change, would he, miracle or not?”

  Sob number three, caught like numbers one and two.

  “So who am I?…”

  “Who are you?” she asked. I could barely hear.

  “I’m the guy driving the other car. I’m the one who died!”

  She removed her hand long enough to ask, “How?”

  “I’m not entirely sure how. Wish I was sure, because then we could all make a pile of money on this, you know, transferring minds from one body to another. But I don’t really know, Annette. I’ve got some theories. They involve the series of treatments I’d been taking. Purely experimental. Part of my partner’s and my so-called business at the Geldhover Laboratories a couple of states away. I’m sure you read in the papers or heard on TV after the car accident that I was a quote distinguished scientist, unquote. Well, I was. And technically it’s beyond you, but maybe not. You’re not stupid. They were combinations of electrolyte solutions that I’d been injecting for about two months. In themselves nothing too unusual.

  “But at the particular time of our accident those solutions were holding in stasis a variety of unstable molecules that my partner and I had constructed, little atomic-sized ‘computers,’ for want of a better word, that under certain chemical stimuli would act in certain primitive yet useful ways. Line up in certain rows, say. Or stand up and wave. Or produce a simple electric charge. Or even an atomic charge. Nano-techs, we called them. You could probably think and figure out how they could be useful in, say, NASA programs and suchlike.”

  “What were they doing inside you?”

  “Well, Annette, the truth is I was stealing them. My partner had gone behind my back and sold our little inventions to a secret arm of the United States Air Force, and when I discovered this fact, completely by accident, by the way, I felt completely betrayed, not by the sale, but by who was getting them. I would have liked Lenovo to get them, or Microsoft. Before he could deliver them, I injected whatever I could find, which was all of about two sets on hand. Then I cashed out my bank accounts and took off. I’d been on the road for about twenty-six hours when the collision occurred.

  “Oddly enough, those Nano-techs inside me not only kept me wide awake and driving all that time, but they aided my vision, and they enhanced my memory, and they also sharpened various visual and judgmental abilities. For example, I saw the car with Scotty and the other two boys coming from far, far away, and saw that there was a chance it would arrive at the highway approximately when I did.

  “Naturally I continually altered my speed to ensure that would not occur. But I didn’t count on the fact that the boys were drunk—sorry to have to tell you—really drunk, and out of control, and that the driver, that boy Alton, he kept drunkenly changing the speed of the car. So that didn’t work out as I planned.

  “As for the exact mechanism of it all, well, I think you’ll have to take some reponsibility for that, Annette. What I mean is the cell phone you insisted Scotty keep nearby all the time he was away from home.

  “When I came to after the crash, I was still in my old man’s body—I like to think of it now as my Mad Scientist’s body—a foot or so through the windshield of my car. But your son was all the way through his, meaning he had not been wearing a seat belt, and I could see that he’d shot right over the air bag, which had opened in time to catch only his feet. The two cars had hit almost head-on: my driver side to his passenger side. Clever Alton was able to swerve the main damage away from himself at the last minute and thus toward your Scotty. The little bastard.

  “The two cars kind of crunched together, and folded, up into the air. Your son’s face was about four inches away from my face, Annette, so I can report that he was still pretty much unconscious, but that his pinned and lifted right hand was tight up against his right ear, and he had that cell phone there and it was turned on: matte green lights on that LG-3 screen. I heard more than saw the other boys hightail it away from the car. One of them—Zach, I think—asked, ‘What about Scotty?’ And Alton replied, ‘He’s dog food.’ Then they fled on foot.

  “And we hung there, folded up maybe eight, nine feet in the air, while the two cars smoked and things started dropping out of them slowly down to the macadam below. I don’t know what: pistons, cogs, brake rotors. Whatever.

  “Then Scotty opened his eyes, conscious for a second. And we just looked at each other. Two poor bastards!

  “That’s when the thunder and lightning began. Of course, in that big, wide-open-plains space, our heaps of metal were the only lightning target for miles and miles around, and Scotty’s phone was the especial target. The first bolt struck the back of my car and it jolted my section down maybe two inches, until my nose was just brushing the bottom of that phone. The second lightning strike, well, all I saw of that was stars, green, red, blue, and yellow, just like in the comics. I’m guessing that strike hit me and the phone and Scotty, and those twelve little molecular computer-thingies inside me. It went kinda ‘twang’ like a giant guitar string. You know, the bottom string? Terwwwaaangggg!

  “When I came to, I was in the intensive care unit in the hospital, and the rest is history…I’m very sorry for your loss, Annette.”

  She started crying then, and I comforted her as best as I could. When she was done, she got up and used some paper n
apkins to wipe her face. She leaned against the brushed metal of the big new Norwegian dishwasher and she asked in a tiny voice: “Now what?”

  And like the gentleman that I am, I said, “That’s entirely up to you, Annette.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Well, it means I can just leave.”

  “You can’t just leave!” she said. “You’re a fourteen-year-old boy! Remember?”

  “I’ll ‘run away.’ Fourteen-year-old boys do that all the time.”

  “Your father will kill me if he finds out I just let you go…I mean Mike will,” she corrected. “As it is, well, he suspects…all isn’t completely right between you and me.”

  “He’ll get over it after a while, Annette. Kids vanish all the time. Why not get pregnant again. That’ll distract him.”

  “Is that what you want? To just disappear? What do I call you? I can’t call you Scotty! Especially now.”

  “I know. Annette, to be honest, I don’t know what to do. Not yet. It’s taken me this many months to adjust to everything that’s happened. Don’t think it was easy, any of it…”

  “You mean deceiving us?”

  “If I’d told the truth right off, where do you think I would be?”

  “Locked up!”

  “At the least…Everyone has a right to survive.”

  “No, you’re right about that,” she admitted. “It was survival. But what about the past?…Are you married? Did you have children? Grandchildren? Should someone know…?”

  “No. No. And no, no one can ever know!”

  She sighed. “Then you probably ought to just stay here. Grow up. Go to college. Mike’s already putting money away for you to go to college. He never put away a cent for Scotty.”