Books On Tape (On Tape)
More like King in Smell-ow, am i right guys?
In honor of the imminent flood and Rapture, I recorded my short story Books on Tape on tape.
Enjoy! 
The Walrus and the Alligator are concerned about the Ant Eater’s recent weight gain
The Ant Eater started eating whole colonies at once.
It was worrying.
The Walrus of course was hardly the person to comment on someone’s recent weight gain so he kept it to himself.
The Alligator wanted to eat him. Because he just kept getting so big, so fat and juicy on those squishy ant colonies.
That’s a strange thing, to want to eat your friend.
I mean, the Ant Eater once saved her life, when she’d been trapped under that fallen Elephant, the Ant Eater had reached her snout in and managed, actually managed, to pull her out with it.
That’s impressive snouting.
And now she looks like dinner.
Difficult situation.
The Walrus had always been large, and frankly, the Walrus had always kind of looked like dinner to the Alligator, but a Walrus is a formidable foe. And the Walrus wasn’t just any Walrus. He was kind of a berserker.
He’d lost an ear in a fight with a Sea Lion. Don’t even look at the back of the left side of his head. It looks like someone sewed new skin on there, its so torn up.
But he’d won that fight. That Sea Lion is dead now.
Don’t fuck with the Walrus.
The Walrus decided to buckle down and say something.
They were, of course, hanging out by another ant colony.
Where the Ant Eater had dragged them, because he couldn’t even go two hours without eating Ants.
Not like the Walrus and the Alligator are aquatic animals, and they didn’t go out of their way to go up on dry land just to hang out with their friend or anything. I mean, hey, if I’m coming to hang out with you, I don’t want to just watch you eat ants all the time. You’re killing yourself.
You’re killing yourself, that’s what he said.
That’s what he found himself saying.
And the Ant Eater looked bad: bloated, pale, just rolled out in the dirt covered in Ants. Ants, Ants, Ants, that’s all he ever talked about.
It was sad.
PART ONE OF UNTIL ITS DONE!
Books on Tape (Edited Version)
Books on Tape
Jason Royal Hart
You have stolen a book on tape, and you get in your bath to listen to it. I’m stuck at the post office.
The book is about a dark elf. The candles around you flicker. I’ll be home soon. It starts to rain.
The tape player opens and a little man made of tape gets out. The tape man sits on the side of the bath, leaning against your shoulder. He is shiny and smells like drying glue.
He gets into the water. Underneath, he is a dolphin, blue around your legs like hail driving sideways.
In Venice, the dolphins were blinded so they could not flee. The Doges were not kind. Their eyes were everywhere.
We placed a golden note in the open mouth of a winged lion and it was brought down to the King.
You will be the Duchess of Manhattan. I will be the Duke, when the King returns. This is the message we receive.
Now, in New York, ten years later, the tape man reaches the drain and there he turns oyster, open. Inside is a ring.
You reach for the ring but you remember the infamous treachery of the dark elves. The oyster snaps shut, turns tape now, and swirls everywhere. You are a lobster wrapped in tape and you close your eyes.
When you look up, the tape is gone, and the ring is on your finger. I enter the bathroom. I am wearing a ring also.
“It came today,” I said. I am holding another book. The Yellow Sign is engraved on the cover. The book is hard-bound, ancient. It is closed with a lock, but the key is on a red ribbon, tied to the book.
I light a candle. You ring a bell. We cut the ribbon. We read.
He comes to build of the world an ordered monarchy. You will be a Duchess. I will be a Duke. This is the deal we have struck.
We read on.
When all the little men are throned in ordered pens, he will drown them until the world is naught but dead Dukes and Duchesses.
Now a torrent begins outside. A tornado is coming.
Tin can hail falls. I run to the bedroom.
My socks slide and I slip. The window blares plasmic water. Everything is slick and wet. I slide to the window on my back. I close it.
We move to the kitchen. Now, enclosed: you, me, a candle, a bell, and a guide to enchanting.
I enchant up some tea. The tea floats in a ball in the air.
It’s hard to hear over the thunder. I cough.
You say, “Try making a cup from the candle.”
I enchant up a cup from the candle. We put the tea in the cup. We share the tea.
The little tape man returns. He whines. I tell him to help.
He picks up the candle, carefully. He is immortal, if he does not burn.
He follows us into the bedroom. We sit on the bed.
He puts the candle on the dresser.
He sits in the tape player and we listen to the stories of the Dark Elves of Menzoberranzan. We pray to Lloth. It is a joke. Lloth is not real.
The King calls. He is drowning the world. You are a Duchess. I am a Duke. We are to drown.
The little tape man screeches as a pole smashes through the window. Power lines whip him and he is burned.
He was immortal, if he did not die.
“Let’s make a boat from the bathtub,” I say.
We enchant the bathtub. We set sail with the candle and the bell.
We will bury what remains of the little tape man when we reach land.
We bob on the water.
“It’s dry in the bathtub,” you say.
I smile. I cough. I’m sick.
We met in Prague before we went on to Venice. I remember college. I remember baseball. I remember food. We ring the bell. The bathtub rises.
It is dawn but we are in the stars, cold, not breathing, not dead, traveling. We reach Formalhaut. We see a comet off in the distant sky.
Our bathtub lands in the red dirt. Ours is the only candle. There isn’t much oxygen here. We bury the tape man.
“Shall we start again,” I ask.
You get out of the bathtub. And you look at the sky.
“You can really see the stars out here,” you say.
Books on Tape (3/3)
Now a torrent begins outside.
Tin can hail falls. I run to the bedroom.
My tractionless shoes slide and I fall.
The window blares plasmic water. Everything is wet.
I fall. I slide to the window on my back. I close it.
We move to the kitchen.
Now we are enclosed: a strawberry candle and a guide to enchanting.
I enchant up some tea.
We drink. You say, “Try making a cup from the candle.”
I enchant a cup up from the candle.
The little tape man is pushed from the drain by the rats in the sewers. He whines. He is my homunculus.
I tell him to help.
He picks up the candle, carefully. He is immortal, if he does not burn.
He follows us into the bedroom. We sit on the bed.
He puts the candle on the dresser.
He walks to the tape player and we listen to stories of Dark Elves in Menzoberranzan.
The King calls.
He is drowning the world. You are a Duchess. I am a Duke. We are to drown.
The little tape man screeches as the power lines fall and he is burned.
He was immortal.
“Let’s make a boat from the bathtub,” I say.
We enchant the bathtub. We set sail with the strawberry candle.
We will bury the little tape man when we reach land.
We bob on the water.
“It’s dry in the bathtub,” you say.
I smile. I cough. I’m sick.
It’s dawn but we are in the stars, cold, not breathing, not dead, travelling. We reach Formalhaut. We see a comet.
Our bathtub lands on a planet. Ours is the only candle. We bury the tape man.
“Shall we start again,” I ask.
You get out of the bathtub. And you look at the sky.
“You can really see the stars here,” you say.
End.
Books on Tape (2/3)
He comes to build of the world an ordered monarchy. You will be the Knight-Duke of Massachusettes.
And when the little men are in ordered pens, he will drown them until the world is naught but dead Dukes.
But you do not know this yet.
You receive a book in the mail. It is yellow. On it’s cover is a sign. The Yellow Sign, you think. Have I heard of the Yellow Sign, you think.
The book is hard-bound, looks ancient. It is held closed by a lock, but the key is on a red ribbon, tied to the book.
You break the thread and unlock the book.
And now you are the Duke. Do you drown?
Reference:
The King in Yellow and Other Horror Stories (Dover Mystery, Detective, & Other Fiction)
Towers in the Sky
I’m blogging this here story I’m writing, right here. It’s raw, unedited and hot like an elephant’s heart.
The thing about these witches is that they’re all tiny dictators. Sure, in their little cages, flying in space, there’s no limit to their power, but get a mile away and they have no control at all. And a mile is a very short distance, once you get away from Earth.
It’s a parlor trick. Punch a hole in space-time and you get a tiny white dot. Hook that up to some wires or a battery or whatever it is that they do with it and you get near-infinite free energy. You can call yourself whatever you want then: king, emperor, god. I’ve seen all of those. We just call them witches. And I hunt witches.
You wouldn’t get away with this kind of garbage on Earth – some real cop would be in your face the minute you punctured the continuum. It’s dangerous. But this is the minefield. It’s all danger up here. It’s all danger and garbage.
Right now I’m outside the airlock doors of one of these witches – this one built herself a castle. It’s kind of funny when you see it from a distance. It’s surrounded by all the normal minefield junk – abandoned satellites, spaceships so scavenged for scrap they’re just skeletons, asteroids, mines left over from one of the wars. Right in the middle of all that is a stone castle with a frickin drawbridge and four frickin towers.
To get to the airlock of this place, you need to fly through a moat. Yeah, a three-dimensional moat made of real water, in space. And it flows in a circle around the place. I can’t even imagine the energy budget for that, containing all that water in a ring and keeping it moving. Astronomical, you might say. You might say that; I wouldn’t. I don’t crack bad jokes.
Usually the witches can do whatever they want up here. Nobody cares. Go ahead and cause a singularity out here and suck a bunch of garbage into another dimension. Save someone else the effort of cleaning it up themselves. Even if one of the witches declared herself princess of the minefield and took it all over, no one would even glance at it through a telescope. But once you start doing something that affects the bigwigs down planetside, you’re done. That’s when they send in someone like me to take care of the problem.
I’m through the moat now and I’m at the airlock, which of course looks just like a medieval drawbridge. It opens and you can’t see hydraulics or anything – it really looks like a wooden gate attached to ancient, creaking chains. It’d be charming, if I was capable of being charmed.
My ship glides in through the airlock and nestles itself in one of the docking bays. All this stuff is automated now. I remember having to actually drive one of these things in the service. What a frickin nightmare that was, especially docking in a place like this. Now they just do all the driving on their own. Put a lot of pilots out of business, that did. Their famous Union didn’t help them there. They crash and burn like anyone else.
I put on my suit and step out of the ship and right here is where I get the idea that this one might be different from all the other witch hunts I’ve been on, because my spacesuit has changed into armor and my ship is now a dragon. Yeah, I just flew here on a dragon. Well, it was damn comfortable inside, I can tell you that.
One of the things you can do with infinite energy is reality engineering. You can more or less create your own little universe inside of the big universe, and you can rewrite the rules of physics for everything that goes on inside.
This is kind of standard practice for these little dictators. They change things as they see fit. I was in a place once where everything was always on fire, but no fuel was ever consumed. One guy fixed gravity so that everything inside his little world was always rotating around him.
This is why the real cops get concerned any time someone pops themselves a power spot. It’s this kind of junk that turned all of Australia into mercury during the wars. After the treaties, the real cops were put in charge of keeping things real.
So these witches make their own little worlds, but usually the crazy rules they make up only apply to things created inside the bubble. You walk in, you stay normal. Not this time. This time, things were getting decidedly weird.
Jonnybell
I’ve decided to publish my short story Jonnybell exclusively on this site. It’s pretty short, so I’m going to just insert the whole thing in this post.
Jonnybell
By Jason Royal Hart
My favorite memory of Jonny was of him leaning over my grill with a summer sun warmed Pabst Blue Ribbon in his right hand. His other hand held back a sweaty strand of neon-red hair.
“That damn bell,” he said. Every morning. Six in the morning. Seven in the morning. Eight –“
“In the morning,” I asked, deadpan.
“Like clockwork,” said Hanna, winking at me.
“Like a clockwork crying baby,” continued Jonny, “With no respect for boundaries. Someone should teach it a lesson.”
“Yeah,” I said, turning over my veggie bratwurst with the tuning fork I’d lifted from the music building the day before I left school, “let’s teach some lessons to bells.”
“You got it,” said Jonny.
Living twenty feet from the world’s biggest alarm clock had deafened Jonny’s ear for irony. We still loved him.
He was right about the bell. Ineloquent as he always was, Jonny was usually right. The bell on the top of St. Casimir’s was a sharpened metronome that spiked the ears of everyone in the neighborhood.
Once, this part of Milwaukee had been full of working class people grateful for free wakeup calls. Now it was full of punks who just wanted sleep past noon.
“I got the keys,” said Hanna. Her blue overalls were painted with stars.
“To what,” asked Jonny.
“To the frigging church, slow-bee. From when I used to run the bake sale,” she said.
Hanna used to be big in the church, until her recent conversion to laziness and brewing beer in her kitchen.
“That so,” asked Jonny. I could see his eyes beetling up and down under his black brows. He was formulating, or fornicating. I could never keep those two straight. One of them you do by yourself, and the other you do with at least one other person. I can remember that.
Whichever one he was doing, Jonny came up with a plan. He lived next to the church, in the illegal attic of a hundred year old house. There were a bunch of these set-ups in Riverwest: apartments that weren’t exactly safe or registered, but the tenants paid in cash and the landlords didn’t look too closely into things like how many people actually lived there, or just what you were growing in that well-lit closet, really.
I lived in a basement over on Booth. We called these apartment Polish flats in Milwaukee – but in a city with so many Poles, that wasn’t an insult. I’d heard they were called garden flats in Chicago, but I was half Polish and I refused with pride to call them that. It was damp and smelly and the only source of heat in the winter was a large gas powered space heater. A Polish flat.
Hanna and I worked over at the bike co-op and we could pretty much scrounge up enough parts to move any amount of brass. We built a device, out of bicycle parts and wire. It looked like something Da Vinci would build, if he were a couple of college dropouts with only a gut feel for engineering.
That night, we stayed up later than usual. Jonny and Hanna drank home brew and smoked fresh from Jonny’s closet, while I sat in Jonny’s backyard and threw sticks for my black lab and my yellow lab. I’d been sober for five years, as had my labs.
At around three A.M. we started building. We had the wheels and gearshifts from a dozen bikes, a whole spool of gauge six wire, and the pointless determination of the casually mad.
It sat in the middle of Jonny’s bedroom. We’d pushed his mattress up against one wall and carefully moved each of his army of terra cotta peace activists to the kitchen. A single bulb hung there, casting a Gandhi-shaped shadow into the room.
I sat down and began to pedal. It was fast at first, but as the wire wound around the spool, the strain on my legs became intense. It felt like the first time I had biked to the top of Holy Hill, back when I had just quit smoking and was out of shape. Hanna aimed the harpoon and took stock of the wind. Jonny stood, salivating, wrapped in a parachute we’d reclaimed from the dump.
“Let go, Jonas!” Hanna shouted, and I dove off the seat.
The harpoon sailed across the sky like a spear destined to martyr a saint. It landed in the bell tower. Jonny pulled the wire taught to confirm its security, and then he dove into the empty space outside of the window. At first I thought he had missed and was meant for the ground. I ran over to the window just as he floated up the wire, noiseless in the cold night.
The bell tower was illuminated only by the blue-white flame of Jonny’s blowtorch. In the room it was dark. We watched the sparks fly out of the tower windows to become moths drowning in frost. Hanna put her hand on my leg. I looked up at her. When she smiled, her lip ring turned and I could see myself reflected in it. We kissed.
“Hey hey!” shouted Jonny.
I pulled away from Hanna and whispered, loudly, for him to shut the hell up.
He tugged on the line, and I plugged the extension cord into the back up generator we’d acquired from the carelessly unlocked bar down the block. The industrial fan hummed as it powered up, and Jonny and Hanna unrolled the parachute across the gap between the buildings.
The chute began to fill with air, and Jonny finessed the bell along the wire underneath with the skill of a card sharp. Then he leapt out, kept aloft by the fury of the fan. It would have never worked normally, but I swear physics was broken that night.
The bell floated down, buoyed and baby like. Jonny sat on top of it like a fairy prince perched on a strawberry. It made no sound as it shuffled papery onto the ground.
What do you do with a kidnapped church bell? We decided to bury it.
Since my apartment was the deepest, it would be the best place to start the digging. Hanna brought over a keg, I baked a veggie pot pie, and we went to work, reconfiguring our faux-Archimedean apparatus to usher the bell into its new home.
Jonny arrived at midnight with the bell in the back of his van, and we noisily squeaked it along guided rails into the house. It was shrouded only by a sewn together mass of blankets and t-shirts, and it clanged once as we moved it, giving Hanna and me an excuse to grab each other’s hands in worry.
But we were not making the most noise on my street that night. There was a show at the punk house next door. We moved the bell into the basement while they made clear their disbelief in residential noise ordinances. A hundred kids and three guitars twenty feet away were likely to prevent anyone noticing any dull peals our stolen friend might manage to mutter.
A few of the punks did notice, though, and poked their heads in through the windows. When they saw that we had stolen the bell, the morning-time nemesis of the neighborhood, they cheered. When they saw the beer and the food, they volunteered to help.
With the help of a whole party house, we ripped into the ground with pickaxes, shovels, and a stolen sledge hammer. By two we’d dug a dozen feet down and six around, and the bell sat in it like a song bird in a stone cage.
We just kept digging. There were always a few of us there, picking away at the walls. For a while, we took the remains out in bags, but then Jonny learned how to craft stone and started making tables and chairs out of the granite and limestone we pulled from the earth.
After a while, we had enough of this crude but smooth furniture to build a kind of cafeteria. Long benches stretched out next to sturdy stone tables that I covered in simple and plentiful food from the aboveground kitchen.
Every day at six, Jonny would ring the bell, mad with delight that he was now its master. The sound aboveground was faint, like a dog barking from a far away hill. The chamber we’d built to hold the bell, though, was underneath the center of the neighborhood. If you were walking above, and the earth began to vibrate a little, it was time for dinner.
Through my door they walked, down the stairs and past my labs, and then to the ladder. They marched vertically, lit by long strands of white Christmas lights that made constellations of their shadows, into our moist and fertile cavern.
At eight P.M. I would send out the soups, at first made from land vegetables, but later on from mushrooms and beans we bred to grow in our underground farms, dim and lit only by light leaked in through the grates which had replaced our back yards.
Some of us caught blind fish in the deep river we discovered, and a few even raised chickens and hogs. Those people were responsible for their own meals – no animals except my labs were allowed in my kitchen.
In spring I quit my job. I was making more then enough money selling my food to restaurants in the surface world. Hanna, likewise, became a full time brewer. Jonny lived on good will and was generous with his crops.
In summer I bought the house I’d been renting and Hanna and I moved in together. Jonny sold his van and made a house boat from reeds. He moored it on the shore of the deep river, and slept there, far from any noise more troublesome than the babble of cold water.
In fall we made the house into a full time gate, and we moved into the first of the underground apartments the miners had begun to dig out. Jonny made us a fine soapstone bed, which we covered in cave cotton and fluffy moss.
On the day our first daughter was born, the miners discovered a giant, near perfect ruby, and we named her after it. This began a trend, and most of the cave girls had names like Jade, Opal, or Emerald. Boys we named Onyx, Copper, and Silver.
Jonny still rang the bell three times a day for meals, and he spent most of the rest of his time wandering through the ever growing mazes of tunnels. He never married. We all considered him our father, although he was only a few years older than us.
When he died, all three thousand of us attended his funeral, and there were very few dry eyes. Alden, his apprentice stone carver, spent a year crafting a great obsidian statue of him carrying the bell on his back, and the day of its unveiling in the great hall, we declared our new city’s name to be Jonnybell.
I and Hanna are old now, and my health does not allow me to travel above.
Hanna still goes up every few days to take our grandchildren to see the sun. We are traditional in that way. Some of the Bellers have never seen the sun, except through the grates and in pictures. When they do go up, it is at night, or under deep cover and special glass, for the unfiltered sun would blind them and burn their skin.
The people who live up there in houses separate from each other, and eat alone in tiny kitchens, know about us. The door is always open, and still some stray down into our subterranean colony. But for the most part, they ignore us, preferring the orthodoxy of dwelling in sight of the stars, instead of each other.
St. Casimir’s never got a new bell. They replaced the one we stole with a computer attached to giant speakers. On some days, I hear its synthetic toll, and I think of Jonny, driven mad enough by sound to create a new world. Then the ringing ends, like all sounds do, and I forget that there was ever a place I lived in that had not been carved from the earth.