9,000,000 Different Senses was published in Night2Dawn issue 5. This was the final issue of Night2Dawn, and can only be purchased directly from the publisher.

Do you ever get that feeling that you are not in your body? Do you ever get that feeling that your body isn’t you, that it’s just this bag of flesh and fat and bone that you are somehow trapped inside, looking out? I used to feel that way all the time; the strange detachment from what was happening all around me, the effortless disconnection from the world. Up until a few months ago I’d lived my life like a receiver hanging off a phone, just drifting back and forth with that buzzing tone coming and going in my head. A corpse hanging from a noose made of spiralling plastic cord. Effortless disconnection.

That’s all stopped now. I’ve found a new way to live.

The Longest Day was written for the alt.fiction.original newsgroup, just to prove that I can do funny (sometimes) as well as scary …

Judgement day was full of surprises.

Firstly, there was the moon of blood. Only the astrologers cared at first, until Coca-Cola found a way to trace their corporate logo across the scarlet disk with a high powered white laser light.

Then the sky went black, leaving the entire world under the dull red light of the blood moon. Photographers were mildly encouraged that the afterlife might resemble a dark room, and torch manufacturers recorded record sales.

The police predicted a massive increase in crime in this world that looked like a perpetual sunset, and were prepared for riots and looting. Thankfully, something to do with the presence of the all-mighty and the imminent judgement of all souls, kept people mostly at home. The only places that were busier than normal were the churches, which found themselves packed to the rafters with sudden converts, and the tanning parlours that saw increased traffic after a popular fashion magazine reported that the red moonlight made some celebrities look pasty.

Some people questioned the notion of a judgement “day” in the following weeks, when it appeared that the all-mighty may have slipped on his delivery date for this one. The church’s official response was that a day is measured from sunrise to sunset and since the sun had failed to rise, there had not been a new day in five weeks.

Just as life was returning to a semblance of normality, the dead began to rise from their graves. Or at least they tried to, but the very practical burying of the dead six feet down did serve as some impediment to the tired and frankly unfit and under-exercised corpses who now found themselves boxed and sunk with not so much as a trowel or small pickaxe. In countries where cremation was preferred to burying there were no such problems, although roving and strangely mischievous dust storms were reported in several cities.

Most of the dead were quickly rescued from their underground internment, although comments were made in several quarters about the lack of forethought in burying people one on top of the other. With no known date for the end of judgement “day”, several companies began offering “casket management systems” that claimed to remove multiple caskets simultaneously from a single grave and arrange them vertically for easy access. There was little call for these however, as most the industrious undertakers, having discovered that there was now no death, had reinvented themselves as “loved one retrieval specialists”.

The dead who were trapped underneath patios or in the foundations of buildings were more difficult to get at, and it was these that the undertakers found to be the most lucrative jobs. The police were initially keen to track the retrieval of these concealed corpses, but lawyers were quick to point out that since the dead had risen from the graves, all current or potential convictions for murder should be null and void. Thus, with no new criminals to defend, the lawyers found a burgeoning market in getting the old criminals they had failed to keep out of prison in the first place back out of prison on a growing list of judgement-day technicalities.

Several weeks into the dead-raising, the first practical problem of having dead people back among the living arose. It had long been a stated fact amongst environmentalists and people of low social tolerance that the planet was overcrowded. When the sodden earth disgorged its population, most people became strangely inclined to agree. Whereas many of the recent dead had relatives who were happy to put them up in cupboards, or underneath the sink, there were many that did not having any living relatives. Entire families, colloquially referred to as being “at the end of the line”, found themselves with nowhere to go.

Thankfully, the inventors of the “casket management systems” were quick to pounce on this problem, and quickly converted the now defunct machinery for getting caskets out of the ground into machinery for putting them back in, and then out again, ad infinitum. Thus, as the living built their buildings taller and taller to cope with their growing population, the dead found themselves digging deeper and deeper until their subterranean refuges had grown large enough to accommodate their considerable numbers. Thankfully, with no death, the difficult matter of people moving from the world of the living to the world of the dead was not encountered.

Automation of the underground facilities was increased until it was possible for a corpse to be popped from its casket and whizzed to ground level in a matter of minutes at the touch of a button.

Time moved on, as it had a tendency to do despite the conviction of the church, and the dead and the living found themselves cohabiting with surprisingly few problems in the early months of judgement day.

Problems did occur however, when the dead started to get a bit bored and began to think about getting themselves jobs. Through yet another legal loophole, it was discovered that the dead did not have to pay any form of taxes, making them ideal employees for anyone who wanted to pay a wage as low as possible for work that no one in their right mind would want to do. Although most of the living where uninterested in this; the teenagers who discovered themselves discharged from their jobs stacking shelves, serving burgers, or collecting glasses in pubs were greatly disgruntled. This disgruntlement was exacerbated by the fact that, as time passed, it became clear that they were not aging and were destined to be trapped in the form of hormonally raging unemployable pubescent psychotics for the rest of eternity.

Or at least until the end of the day.

And so it came to pass that “Peter Pan’s Law” was drafted by the international court. Australia was nominated as the continent of the teenager and all people over the age of eighteen or younger than twelve were required to relocate to another continent, an evacuation that was completely remarkably swiftly once everyone was told that an uncountable legion of teens were about to arrive.

Country by country, the nations of the world rounded up their children and transported them to Australia where they were placed in the careful care of the “Oz-Rangers”. Not only did the Oz-Rangers provide a much needed security service, but also solved the problem of what to do with all the criminals previously housed in prisons who now, like the dead, had nowhere to go.

Naturally, the church initially objected to the treatment of the world’s sons and daughters in this way, until it was pointed out that perhaps God would be able to deliver the rest of judgement-day more expediently if the living organised themselves by size.

This poem was originally published on the WordRiot website.

This is my fifth milkshake,
I should really exercise more,
she isn’t coming.

I should have brought a book with me,
something intelligent, something cool,
she isn’t coming.

I should have offered to meet her somewhere else,
somewhere with reservations,
she isn’t coming.

I wonder if people are looking at me.
I wonder if they know
she isn’t coming.

The victim waited in darkness and silence. It was faceless and formless, without past or present. Yet, the victim infinitely preferred the nothingness of the void to what it knew inevitably come after. Time did not exist here, yet the victim was aware that the void would give way, must give way, to the other world and that the time of the other world was passing. And so, it came and would come inexorably after. In the other world they were moving; they were living and thinking their dark, soul-born thoughts. They were plotting, whenever and wherever they were … they never stopped plotting.

The writers were merciless, pathological, and deadly without exception.

It always started in the same way. It always started with the name. It was incantation, enchantment, the black and white magic of the writers. Bound in flesh that lay heavy on its non-existent frame, the victim walked through the door into its bedroom from the void. Its name was Melissa Hunter.

Its form was crude for the moment, shifting as it moved across the room, its flesh more pliable and fluid than true human flesh. Its creation was not yet complete. As the victim walked across the room, furniture appeared as the writer willed it; its wand spilling black lies onto the page that became real in the world of the victim. A bed appeared, generic and indescribably bland, nothing more than a receptacle for a tossed handbag by an unknown designer. The victim looked at the bed suspiciously from the corner of its eye. Time was always different here; details were rich in the writer’s past, lavish and speculative in its future. The details of the bed, of the room, of the victim, were sketchy and ill-defined; it was the writer’s present were things were known and therefore needed little explanation. Still, the bed was disturbing. There was rape before death in the beds of the writer’s present world.

A dressing table appeared, stocked with generic and nameless paraphernalia, then a desk with a computer. The victim sat at the dressing table and looked at itself in the mirror. Its flesh solidified at the writer’s command, the details becoming compelling. The victim was young; its death no doubt meant to be more shocking, more terrible, when it was judged as a theft with a value in years that would not be lived.

The victim, having died uncountable times, viewed all life as equally precious; a moral standpoint that was easy to maintain when the victim’s life was under the control, the very whim, of the unseen but omnipresent master of this world. The true crime was the the writer could create any life that he wished, any world that he wanted, and that with all this power at his command he chose to populate the world with victims created with such care so that every life was a tragedy when lost.

The victim watched as its face solidified and hair grew from its scalp to tumble down to its shoulders. Clothing sprouted and spread across its shapeless figure, only for the material to pinch and bulge as the god-head of the writer spun its thoughts into unreal flesh. It was so often the mirror, as if the writer knew his victim was something more than a creation of ink and thought and limitless imagination, and that he wanted to taunt the victim’s true mind as much as he would taunt the mind and torture the flesh that he would give it. The victim had always considered the writer to be a “he”, not an “it” as the victim considered itself, as gods were so often men in this world.

The victim turned away from the mirror, having brushed its hair and dabbed vaguely at its makeup. The mirror had done its work for now, turning its dead glass eyes over the world, reflecting details that had not been there before. The victim’s head filled with thoughts, memories of a a day just passed that had not truly been. A job, friends, a family far away, a hobby too often neglected and self deprecating thoughts of all the things missing from a life filled with nothingness and lies. The victim realised that this was the life it was about to lose. A gift, of sorts, from the writer.

The victim’s head, full to bursting with memories that belonged to its life but that felt as awkward as borrowed clothes, turned towards the computer. I walked to it, watching as it sprung into a life of its own. The victim’s reflection appeared on the black screen for a moment, whilst the victim became dimly aware of a the new memory of switching on the machine, crudely pasted in retrospect into its mind. The black glass eye of the writer reflected the world for a moment more, etching details into the face of the victim.

The computer’s modem hissed and screeched and crackled. The victim’s hands reached out and splayed across the keyboard. All the keys were blank, as the writer had not told them to be otherwise. The victim started to type; the movement was effortless, one movement and one moment flowing into the next, awkward physical realities ignored with a pen-stroke. The victim didn’t know if the room contained one chair or two, if it had turned on the computer with a switch or a button, if the electricity had been on or off beforehand. In so many ways, the world created by the writers was purer and more potent than the world that they themselves inhabited. The victim did not pity them thought, only longed for its void, for its world, and for an end to the torture of flesh and weight, false thoughts and shallow memories. Could the victim have learned to love this world, as it loved the timeless void that existed in the lapses between the whims of the writers? It would never know, for its purpose was only to live and to die and to live and to die, again and again; its death always more vivid and long lasting than its life.

The victim’s fingers continued to rattle across the unmarked keys, and the monitor that had been the eye of god was filled with images of another world that did not exist within this world that did not exist. Words began to fill the screen, a dialog designed, drafted and choreographed to move the victim towards its end at the hands of the as yet unseen killer. The victim watched and keyed the responses that the writer demanded. Every sentence added another layer to the victim’s history, an extraordinary cruelty as the false mind that the writer created threatened to overwhelm the victim’s own.

Once before, when being torn from the void was still unexpected, the victim had been fooled into forgetting itself and had lost its own mind inside that of the creature that was weaved and sculpted around it in flesh and false histories. The loss, the abandonment of identity had been so total that the victim had not know the void when it returned to it after the stinging kiss of the grave had brushed lips that the victim believed to be its own. But in the void there is no time and so the memories of the otherworld could not exist, fading instead like the night’s frost from a window pane come morning. The victim’s own timeless mind returned as its naked form spun within the infinite emptiness of the void until it had lost all shape and didn’t look like a person at all.

That had been the most bitter death by far and even though the details of that lost life so loved now came only in flashes when the victim’s mind was not quite filled with the shadow fiction of a life new-born in ink and ideas, it knew that it must never forget itself again or risk feeling the icy pain of death as keenly as it had done once, when it had let itself become a person.

More words were spun and the victim began to wonder if this computer, the neglected hobby, was to be the route by which it would meet its demise. Silver-grey memories of other lost lives flicked at the corners of the victim’s mind, dread images of what had been in other times and other places that somehow intruded into this unreal world. The victim knew that the electric world, the world behind the screen, was where the predators of the writer’s world prowled, where its degenerates stalked its innocents and evil lurked beneath the glittering surface of zeroes and ones. The victim waited for the next incantation, waited for the inevitable words that would transform the scene and the world around it. The victim waited, feeling the moment bear down on it, the time of this world taking physical form.

“Where are you?” The victim typed the question and hit a blank key, sending the question into the electric ether, a small piece of bait in its un-life long search for love and companionship. The victim’s heart fluttered in its chest, as the mind of the other, the Mellissa-mind, filled with fantasies of romance. The writer sent words from the tip of its wand to the flickering screen …

“Behind you.”

The victim didn’t move. Time was frozen; the screen held in mid-flicker, the stream of words to it and the world around abruptly ended. Sometimes, the victim had learnt, there were moments like this before a change; before the hand of the writer reached back into the minutes and hours past and changed this reality. What wrinkle, what detail, was changing? A lost set of keys appeared in the victim’s memory as perfectly as if they had always been lost and the victim knew this as surely as it knew its name was Mellisa Hunter and all the details that went with this life. Something else appeared in memory, a forgetful friend who knew that she had the keys “somewhere”. A new face appeared in the victim’s memory and superimposed itself over the face of a friend who no longer existed. To be edited out of existence, how the victim longed for that calm and painless dispatch back into the void.

Time began to move again, sluggishly at first, the universe moving like a sleeper roused from a dream. Words began to flow into the present again, the writer’s pen no longer dipped into the shallow ink well of the past. Time’s gears meshed with a crunch that only the victim could hear, and everything started to move again.

Melissa Hunter span around in her chair. Crouching on the bed behind her was the hulking form of The Killer. He was dressed completely in black and a ski mask with ragged eye holes covered his face. In one gloved hand he held a palm top computer with a glowing blue screen, in the other an eight inch knife with a serrated edge. Melissa scrambled out of the chair and tried to run for the door. This was a time that lasted the longest, the agonisingly detailed time of the kill, the time for the death of the victim.

The Killer leapt from the bed, dropping the computer and reaching out for Melissa with his free hand. It clasped around Melissa’s shoulder, pulling her backwards. Her blouse fell open as she toppled; the victim looked down at the naked flesh of its, of Melissa’s, body. The Killer fell down on top of Melissa, the victim could feel its ribs being crushed as the air was forced from Melissa’s lungs. Beyond its control, the victim’s hands clawed at The Killer and its legs thrashed weakly from side to side. The Killer took a handful of Melissa’s hair and pounded her head against the floor; once, twice, three times, more, until stars filled the victim’s vision and its limbs grew too weak to claw or thrash. Melissa’s consciousness started to fade. This was not death, the victim had felt this softer, warmer sort of fading before. This was unconsciousness, a gift of peace from the writer before it plunged the victim down into some greater horror.

The Killer shifted its mass from the victim’s weakly fluttering chest. Melissa coughed up blood; the victim felt the a warm sticky bubble pop between its lips and splatter on its cheek. Only when you have died in so many, many ways can the taste of blood in your mouth grow familiar. The fireworks and falling stars faded from Melissa’s vision. Her eyes were pointing at a picture of her family who lived so far away. They had no faces, no features or clothes; they were just concepts, abstracts. Everyone’s father, everyone’s mother, everyone’s sister or brother or dog. Just a photo of another normal family, its purpose nothing more than to produce, raise and eventually grieve this victim-child.

The cold top of The Killer’s knife rested on Melissa’s bare abdomen. Her flesh goosebumped and quivered underneath it. The victim lay rigid within Melissa’s flesh, feeling the cold touch of the metal, the involuntary movements of its body as commanded by the writer. Melissa’s head swivelled slowly and uncertainly to face The Killer; her eyes and the victim’s eyes behind locked with his. Were they wild, The Killer’s eyes, feral and animalistic? Were they cold, they eyes of a fiendish calculating machine? What drove this killer, what mystery could be found behind these poorly framed and rendered windows onto his soul?

The victim had been killed in more ways that it could count, by more killers with more dark and twisted and sickening motives than even the timeless and endless halls of purgatory could hold. And yet, this moment was different. The writer’s pen executed the stroke into Melissa’s soft belly, the knife blade following seamlessly behind, and this was no different to the many cuts and punctures that had come in the times before. The gushing blood the pen painted, that splattered onto The Killer and spread out like an ink blot on tissue paper across the floor, was as rich and as warm and as deep a red as ever. The pain … the pain flowed from the tip of the pen as it always had, Melissa and the victim screaming together, but this too was no different than any of the times before.

The difference was in the eyes of The Killer. The writer’s pen ahd crafted them with the same care he had taken to fashion eyes of Melissa so that she could see her killer and lock eyes with him at the moment of her death. From behind Melissa’s eyes, the victim stared into the eyes of the killer and found something that staring back at it from behind those very eyes. The victim locked eyes behind eyes with a creature that it could tell a had killed as many times and in as many ways as the victim itself had been made to die. Something passed between these two time-lost thought-melded creatures then, something beyond the power of the writer’s pen to shape and control and dictate in this world of lies and shadows that lay outside the void. It was a shared history; a history of violence, cruelty, perversion and death. All the victim’s past lives and deaths, but seen from the viewpoint this time of the creature behind the eyes of The Killer. A slave, just like the victim, but one who’s task was not to live and to die again and again, but to kill and to rape and to torture and defile. A black history of murder to match the victim’s uncountable lost lives.

The victim felt the life fading from its body as the last droplets of pain were committed to the page. It could feel the perfect emptiness of the void opening up to receive it again; a child unborn back into the womb. Would the memories of this life be lost, like all the time and place spun stories, or would the victim remember what it had shared and learned in these past moments? In either case, as the victim faded back into the void, as Melissa Hunter was no more, it felt the painful strokes of the pen less keenly. The victims would be born into lives worth loosing only to die and to die again; but there were other ways, far worse ways, to be a slave and a victim of the writer’s whim.