I Contain Multitudes Named Claymore Award Finalist
I’m pleased to announce that my yet-to-be-published novel, I Contain Multitudes, was named a finalist for the Claymore Award! This award is presented by the Killer Nashville Conference for the first fifty pages of an unpublished manuscript. I Contain Multitudes is a multiversal horror-fantasy that sits at the intersection of the fantastic and the frightening, with crisp prose and strong, grounded characters. It is a finalist in the Science Fiction/Fantasy category.
Last year, I Contain Multitudes was a winner in the Chicago Writers Association’s First Chapter Contest. For more information and inquiries about publication, contact me.
Here’s the first chapter for your reading pleasure:
They slowed the car down just enough that she didn't break anything when she hit the pavement. Lights flared red as the car screeched to a halt, and Trina dusted herself off, wondering if they might throw the thing in reverse and come back at her. They didn't. They only sat with the passenger door open, revving the engine, daring her to follow them until they were sure that she wouldn't. Tires spun dirt at her and she kicked it back as the car lurched forward and the door swung closed. Trina shouldered her backpack and watched them go until the lights were gone, leaving her dirty and sore at the edge of the cracked blacktop.
The road stretched out ahead and behind without a break or a bend in sight, like a string pulled taut across the sandy earth. Those kids couldn't have picked a worse place to leave her if they'd tried, with the sky growing dark and the low hills of the desert surrounding her on all sides. If she was caught out here, there'd be nowhere to hide, no water to cross. None to drink either, though she figured she'd be able to make it to the next Turning. If she was going to get caught, chances were it would have happened by now. Either way, she wasn't going back until she had to, and that left her no choice but forward.
She imagined it was possible she'd run across the kids in the car again at some stop somewhere up the road. There'd been three of them, two girls and a painfully skinny guy whose names she hadn't bothered to remember. They were younger than her, barely out of their teens, but Trina had been desperate enough to say yes when they offered her a ride. They hadn't gone more than three miles before the blonde with the pixie-cut hair started eyeing her up like they were going to rob her or worse. Trina had told them to stop, and after another mile they almost did, which was good enough. They wouldn't last, but the ache in her shoulder would, and it would keep her from taking any more reckless chances.
She walked for more than an hour before she saw the light of the sign bleeding up into the starry sky, and almost an hour more before she finally stood beneath it. It was one of those old-fashioned neon jobs with the letters spelled out in loops of glowing glass tubes. Next to it crouched a single-story building with a flat roof and a handful of doors that opened directly onto the parking lot. The kids' car wasn't in that parking lot, but it wouldn't have made a difference if it had been. She was tired enough that it didn't matter that the place made her itch just looking at it. There was nowhere else for miles, and the word VACANCY still meant what it always had. It blinked at her in blue, the electric buzz of the thing drawing her in like a bug zapper drew in flies.
The manager's office was a grim cubicle lined with peeling wallpaper and cloudy windows. A ceiling fan turned lazily, stirring the musty air, and a bug trap in the corner of the floor turned the itch into something more like crawling. Still, it was better than going back to the road. She leaned against the chipped Formica countertop and was just about to ring the bell when a door opened and a squat man lumbered in, leaving the sound of a flushing toilet behind him.
"Forty-five," he said, not bothering to wait for her to ask, not bothering to meet her eye. She pulled a wad of brightly-colored bills out of her pocket, and it took her a while to find the right ones. The man counted them against the curve of his stomach and let out a little grunt to let her know she'd gotten it right. He wore a faded short-sleeve shirt, its buttons straining, and he had a tattoo on one forearm in the shape of a lightning bolt. He slid the guest book toward her and slapped a key down on top of it. She took the key and signed the book with a name that wasn't her own.
"Ice machine's busted," he said. "Checkout's at noon or I charge you for another night. No guests, no funny business, yeah?"
She nodded, but the man had already turned away.
- - -
The room was no better than the front office had led her to expect, with wood-paneled walls and shag carpet and a lamp with a bulb she had to fiddle with before it would light up. The sheets were old and had cigarette burns on their edges, but they smelled like they'd been washed recently, and after the road even a lumpy mattress seemed like a luxury.
She rinsed her face in the slow trickle of water from the bathroom faucet. The mirror was cracked, but she had no use for it anyway, and the shower looked like it was held together with sloppy ropes of caulk that had long since crusted over with mildew. She could smell herself through her clothes, but getting clean could wait until morning. If she waited until morning, there might even be soap.
She kept her jacket on, afraid to lose it, and flopped down on top of the bedspread. Ancient springs groaned beneath her, and she took comfort from the sound, from the squeaky insistence of it, the very realness of it. She pulled her backpack close and curled herself around it, as if it were an egg, just ready to hatch. As the sound of the springs gave way to the rhythm of her breathing, her last thoughts were of flowers, and of wrinkled hands wrapped over her own. She smiled, because she could see the flowers in her mind as clear as if they were right in front of her, fat peonies, each one with petals like a burst of fireworks. She smiled, because in her mind the flowers were blue.
- - -
When she awoke, the angle of the sun through the window blinds told her that she had slept through most of the morning. She remembered the manager's warning about checkout time, but she knew at once that the manager wasn't there anymore. The mattress didn't groan as she stood up. She pushed down to test it and found that the lumps were gone, the sheets no longer thin and full of holes. In the sunlight, the room was bright, with white-painted walls and an abstract painting in a silvery frame hanging across from the bed. Better, it was clean, and she wasted no time taking off her shoes to feel the carpet beneath her bare feet.
When she turned the bathroom tap, the water came out strong and cold. She cupped her hands beneath it and drank until her stomach hurt. This time there were towels that looked fluffy and unused, and there were soaps--little triangles wrapped in paper--sitting on top of them. She pulled some cleanish clothes from her backpack and kept them perched on top of the toilet lid, watching them warily as the grime and weeks of road dust spiraled down the drain between her feet.
As she scrubbed, she thought of the teenagers who'd booted her from the car. She wondered if they were still out there, somewhere. She wondered if she had ever been that young. Surely, she couldn't be that much older, but if time still had any meaning, she'd lost it long ago. Her fingertips found the raised ridges on her skin, little scars on her arm, on her stomach, but she had long since stopped wondering how she had gotten them.
There was a diner across the road from the motel that hadn't been there when she'd checked in. It sat in the middle of a row of aging brick buildings that crowded the wide sidewalks. Shining cars with high tailfins wrapped in chrome crept by in the street as sharp-suited men wound their way between them. On the far side of the street, a woman in sunglasses and a wide-brimmed hat was being pulled along by a terrier on a leash. It was all so bright that Trina had to squint to look at them, but her eyes kept returning to that diner, to the white and orange striped awnings over its windows. Her stomach gave a little turn as the smell of frying bacon came to her on the breeze, and she decided that she could afford to linger here, if only for a little while.
The place had hand-lettered signs in the windows and a little bell that tinkled as she opened the door. She found a booth away from the windows where she could see the entrance and tried to lose herself in the cushions as she checked her pockets to see if she still had anything in them that might pass for money. The waitress poured her coffee without asking. She had red hair and wore a white apron over a lime-green uniform that might have gone out of style forty years ago, but seemed perfectly at home among the vinyl-backed seats and metal barstools.
"Is there a bus stop, or a train station somewhere around here?" Trina asked.
"I suppose that depends on which way you're headed," the waitress said.
"I don't know yet."
"Well, it's like they say, if you don't know which way you're going, any road'll get you there. But if you go south on Main Street here, there's a bus depot that'll give you some options. If you've got a mind to stay though, we've got a mean pot pie on the dinner menu tonight. Fresh mushrooms. Cook brings 'em in special."
The waitress took her order, punching holes into a strip of paper with a metal stylus, and walked away, red ponytail swaying against her back. Trina wondered if the waitress had gone to bed the same way she had last night. Was this just another day to her? Just one in a series of days, each one so much like the last that they blurred together in her memory, familiar but indistinguishable? Would her tomorrow be the same?
A little girl peeked at her over the back of the next booth, dark ringlets of unruly hair hanging down over eyes that were gone as quickly as they'd appeared. Trina scanned the other tables, trying to see what they used here for money. There was a crumpled collection of paper strips in her jacket pocket, probably what was left over after she'd paid for the room last night. None of them had denominations on them, but she knew it wouldn't be enough.
When her food came, she pulled the plate close and hunched over it with her fork in her fist. There were potatoes and bacon, with a whole plate of pancakes and eggs that still tasted like eggs. They made a dense little ball in her stomach, but she kept going anyway. She couldn't remember the last time she'd eaten, and didn't know when she'd be able to again. She caught a man looking down his glasses at her from two tables over, but she paid him no mind. In a few hours he'd be gone anyway, gone with all the rest of it.
When she reached for the water glass she saw that the little girl was there again. Her eyes were a dark brown and her face was smeared with jelly. She smiled down at Trina, and her smile made it seem as if someone had turned on a light in a dark room. Trina put her hands over her eyes and the girl ducked back down, giggling. When she took her hands away, the girl was back, bouncing with excitement, the tight curls of her hair dancing around her face. Trina smiled back, watching until the girl disappeared again, tugged down by her shirt by a mother who didn't even bother to turn around.
Trina tugged the paper placemat out from under her plate, and found a map on the other side. It was made for kids to color in crayon, with big block lettering and a cartoon truck driver waving out of the window of his cab. But apart from the little-kid trappings, it was nearly the same map she had seen three weeks ago on the wall of a train terminal. Some of the roads were different, but the basic layout was the same. She found the familiar spot near the north edge where two of the larger roads merged into one and rubbed an X into it with the edge of her fingernail.
The little girl rose up again, moving slow with mischief in her eyes, making the two of them co-conspirators. Trina laid a finger across her lips, and the little girl bit back a giggle as her whole body started to tremble. Trina tried to smile back, but couldn't quite manage it this time, not before the little girl's mother spun her around and sat her back down again.
Should she tell them, she wondered? Should she take the mother aside and whisper the truth into her ear, that she should grab onto her daughter and old her tight while she still could? Would it make one difference either way, when the change came, when this diner and the waitress in her uniform and the curls in the little girl's hair blew away on the wind as if they'd never been there at all?
She turned back to the map, and kept her head down as she tried to work out the distances. There was a wide arrow in the center of the paper with a drawing of the diner sitting beside it. The road she needed to take wasn't the same one as the night before, but the miles seemed mostly the same. If she started out now, if she could get to the bus depot and find one going that way without any stops, she might just make it this time.
She looked up, hoping to see the little girl, but the little girl wasn't there. She and her mother were gone, and they had left a little stack of the paper strips behind among the dirty plates. Trina thrust them into her pocket when no one was looking and hurried out the door.
- - -
There was a little bookshop across the street with fading hardcovers in the window and green paint peeling away from the door. A little cart with a taped-on sign advertised the books it held as One for a Tad, Three for a Shred. She felt the wad of papers in her pocket, and thought for a moment about buying one. She didn't have time to waste, though, and needed all she had for the road ahead. Still, something kept her lingering in that doorway, a nagging tingle at the base of her skull that she had long since learned to trust.
She saw it a moment later, a tall silhouette with long, spindly limbs and a wide-brimmed hat. It stood beneath a tree at the edge of the town square, a figure not clad in black, but made of black, as if someone had cut a hole out of the world in the shape of a man. It stared out at the crowded street, its outline shifting and shimmering like heat rising from a desert road.
Trina ducked back in the doorway and watched the thing as its head tracked from side to side, eyeless but still searching. Searching for her. It was The Tall Man. He was alone this time, but where there was one of them, the other Shadows were never too far behind. It hadn't found her yet, but it would. It was only a matter of time.
She waited for a group of people to pass and fell in behind them, keeping pace, letting them shield her from view. The thing seemed to sense her movement and set off towards her, advancing with deliberate strides. It stepped through the fence without slowing, the iron rails bending like taffy around it, snapping back into place in its wake. No one on the street reacted to its presence, but still they altered their paths to stay out of its way, passing it by inches without ever seeming to know it was there.
Trina turned the corner, and when she was sure the thing couldn't see her, she broke into a run. There was no one to hide behind here, but she could see an alleyway up ahead. If she could make it there without being seen, she figured she might just have a chance. A pickup truck trundled out from that alleyway and paused before it turned onto the street. She hopped into the back and flattened herself down against the tailgate. By the time The Tall Man reached the corner, she was already halfway down the road.
- - -
The back of the truck had been stacked with boxes, so the driver didn't notice her until they were the better part of a mile out of town. She muttered an apology when he pulled the truck over, but he waved it away and asked her which way she was headed. When she pointed east, he smiled and said that he could take her as far as Midlington. She checked the map and told him that would be okay.
The guy looked older than she was by more than a few years, but he was handsome behind the black stubble on his chin and he seemed harmless enough. He had a nice smile and when he asked her where she had come from, he listened, even though she could tell that he knew she was making it all up. There was something in the way he looked at her, not just looking but really seeing. She hadn't been seen like that in a long time.
When she left him later that night, snoring softly on the narrow bed in his one-room apartment, she dressed in the dark without looking back. She couldn't risk seeing that his face wasn't the one that had smiled at her from the driver's seat of that pickup truck. She couldn't risk finding out that the man in the bed didn't remember her at all.
Photo by Jonathan Kemper on Unsplash