Twit Publishing Presents: Pulp! Winter/Spring 2011

By Chris Gabrysch

Spine-tingling tales of suspense and terror!
Prowl the exotic streets of Cairo's seedy underbelly in A Shot in the Dark, follow the haunting notes of the Balalaika to vampire-ridden Czarist Russia, and ride the western range with Montana Jack as he hunts for vengeance.
Stroll the halls of Miskatonic University with The Interview, shiver from macabre horror of In the Bones, and spy upon the fantastic in the sword and sorcery yarn Whatever Happened to the Dark Lord?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Twit Publishing
• Release date: Jan 18, 2011
• ISBN: 9780984547739

Chris Gabrysch

Chris Gabrysch is the editor of numerous anthologies and short story collections.He currently lives in Dallas, Texas.

Book preview

Twit Publishing Presents: PULP!

Winter/Spring 2011

Edited by

Chris Gabrysch

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Published by Twit Publishing at Smashwords

PULP! Winter/Spring 2011

Copyright © 2010 by Twit Publishing LLC

All authors retain copyrights to the works of fiction contained herein.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law.

For information address: Twit Publishing PO Box 720453 Dallas, Texas 75206.

The following works are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the authors' work.

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The editor would like to thank Joshua Toon (singular, not plural . . . the world couldn’t handle more than one). I would also like to thank the writers from TPPP! Summer/Fall 2010 for all their support and hard work. Also, a very big thanks to the Dallas book stores that carried it: Cliff Notes, Paperbacks Plus, and Awesome Comics.

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Contents

Foreword

by Chris Gabrysch

A Shot in the Dark

by Peter Michael Rosenberg

Balalaika

by Jennifer Loring

Install

by Drew Wilcox

Smooth as Sharkskin

by Slade Grayson

The Truth about Michael Mallory

by Davin Kimble

Montana Jack

by Dave P Fisher

The Interview

by David DeMar

In the Bones

by Eric Anderson

Double Take

by Chris O'Grady

My Date with Red

by Tom Swoffer

Whatever Happened to the Dark Lord?

by Frank R Sjodin

The Schitzel Connection

by Cyril C Young, Jr

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Foreword

by Chris Gabrysch

Usually the sequel sucks and is over-priced. Usually.

You can’t tell by looking at the price but I am very proud (I hate using very but it’s true) of Twit Publishing Presents PULP! Summer/Fall 2010. It was a great anthology and will always be loved as my firstborn child, but it was an under-priced experiment. Unfortunately, we had to raise the price on the rest of the series. TPPP! Summer/Fall 2010 will always remain at that low price however long it is humanly possible. We at Twit Publishing feel that you should always have your mistakes staring you in the face for as long as possible or at least until they turn eighteen.

Now, do I think TPPP! Summer/Fall 2010 is worth more? Hell yeah I do! But Twit Publishing has principles and we’re not raising the price unless there’s an apocalyptic reason: Zombies, the Four Horsemen, or Nuclear will do.

Although the price has been raised some on the print edition, the e-book price has only gone up a buck respectively. If you have read my rant about pixels vs. ink and paper in the foreword from TPPP! Summer/Fall 2010 then you know why we’re keeping the prices of our digital formats at only a few bucks. If you haven’t read it, well I’m sorry, you’ll have to pick up a copy of it for yourself.

If you have read the first book in the PULP! series you should be happy that this one is just as good, if not better than the first. If you disagree with me, I’ll call you a communist and a liar.

I’m allowed that as an editor. It’s in my contract.

Chris Gabrysch

12/7/2010

Dallas, Texas

A Shot in the Dark

by Peter Michael Rosenberg

It was not in Nabilah’s nature to speculate on why the English woman’s bed had not been slept in. Foreigners were strange — everyone knew that. Nabilah barely knew what the English woman looked like, having only glimpsed her running in and out of the hotel at all hours, camera in hand, always in a hurry, not so much as a hello or a good morning. If the English woman had spent the night elsewhere, it was of no consequence to her. But on the second morning, seeing that once again the bed had not been slept in, Nabilah became a little uneasy. She mentioned her concerns to the housekeeper, who then glared at her and told her to mind her own business.

It was only on the third morning, when she entered the room, that Nabilah noticed the terrible smell. She was neither an especially bright nor worldly woman, but she knew instantly what that dreadful odour meant. Her screams alerted the hotel manager, Mister Ben Ami, who, insisting that the maid compose herself, investigated for himself.

Five minutes later, employing his usual discretion, Mister Ben Ami telephoned the Cairo Police and informed Chief Inspector Walaa Youssef that the dead body of an English woman had been discovered at the Hotel Cleopatra, locked in the wardrobe of Room 111.

Inspector Youssef strode along the busy Cairo street. At six foot four, he towered above the majority of Egyptian men, and in his beige overcoat and black Homburg (an affectation he admitted he had adopted from Hollywood), he was an instantly recognisable figure. By contrast, his loyal assistant Ali was almost invisible, and his small, slight presence was swept along in the Inspector’s slipstream.

The Hotel Cleopatra was once the grandest building in the city. Now it barely registered, dwarfed by its newer, high-tech neighbours. Long before arriving at the entrance, the Inspector caught glimpses of its crumbling façade mirrored in the glass and steel of the banks and offices that towered around it.

Mister Ben Ami was waiting anxiously by the hotel entrance. He greeted the Inspector as he might a visiting dignitary — the Inspector’s reputation preceded him — and then ushered them into the hotel.

As they wandered through the lobby and up the stairs, the Inspector was made painfully aware that the Hotel Cleopatra was no longer the institution it had once been. The finest hotel in Cairo had fallen into sad disrepair: peeling paint, worn fabrics and grubby wallpaper signalled years of neglect and underinvestment. And there was the noise. The venerable hotel dated from the golden age, a time when the internal combustion engine was a novelty and the horse-drawn caleche greatly outnumbered the newfangled automobile. Sadly, Cairo was now as renowned for its traffic congestion as it was for its antiquities. Walaa could remember the time when visiting Heads of State had been accommodated at the Hotel Cleopatra. Those days were long gone.

In the corridor outside Room 111, the Inspector — aware that the discovery of a dead body was hardly a public relations coup for the hotel — assured the nervous manager that he and his men would keep a low profile so as not to alert other guests, and guaranteed that the Press would hear nothing about the incident until a full investigation had been carried out.

Inspector Youssef closed the door to Room 111 and locked it behind him. Now then Ali, he said. What have we here? Ali’s heart raced at the sound of these words, just as it had when, as a child, his father would preface a bedtime story with the ubiquitous Fi mara min el marat. Like once upon a time, Inspector Youssef’s rhetorical question heralded another adventure.

There were some in the Cairo Police Force who thought the Inspector something of an anachronism with his penchant for hunches, his disdain for modern forensic techniques and a rather quaint reliance on old-fashioned deductive reasoning. But Ali, who had worked alongside the Inspector for many years, knew what many refused to acknowledge: that when it came to solving crimes, no one had a better record than Chief Inspector Walaa Youssef.

The warm, midmorning sun slipped in through the splintered, slatted blinds, illuminating a dusty, three-bladed fan which rotated slowly above their heads, casting shifting shadows onto the cracked ceiling. Walaa Youssef sighed. As he gazed around the bedroom he noticed more signs of deterioration: light fittings hanging loose from the wall like broken limbs, chipped plaster around the ceiling, and carpets worn threadbare from decades of use. Even the antique Colonial furniture needed attention if it was not to end up on a bonfire before too long.

The traffic rumbled past the window, and the noise — when combined with the racket made by the ineffectual air conditioner — reverberated throughout the cavernous room like thunder: rattling the glass and shaking the floorboards. It was so loud that the Inspector had to raise his voice to speak to his assistant, who was standing just a few feet away.

Ellen Divine lay in a heap. Her legs were doubled up inside the enormous mahogany wardrobe. Her torso, arms, and head spilled out untidily onto the parquet floor. She was dressed in just her underwear: white briefs and a singlet. She was a slight woman in her early sixties with short, grey hair and a rough, tanned complexion. Her hands, forearms, shoulders, hips, and knees were all badly bruised as if she had been beaten all over by a particularly brutal assailant. She stank. Cooped up for three days in an ancient, airless wardrobe in the middle of an Egyptian summer . . . it wouldn’t be pleasant when you were alive and it certainly hadn’t done the late Ellen Divine any favours.

The only other objects to be found in the cavernous wardrobe were an empty black canvas shoulder bag and a camera: a battered old Practica.

Walaa Youssef made a swift appraisal of the situation. As the room was just one floor up from the main lobby, the windows in both the bedroom and the bathroom were protected by iron bars. It was probably an unnecessary precaution; the room fronted one of the busiest streets in Cairo and would be nigh impossible to enter without being observed. The bedroom door — the only other entrance — had been locked when the maid came to service the room. The key to the wardrobe was on the bedside table where the manager had found it. Being a stickler for exactitude, he had returned it to its place after opening the wardrobe door.

The Chief Inspector assimilated all this with just a few cursory glances: in the business of detection, first impressions were critical. There was no blood visible on the body, no obvious gunshot or knife wounds, no ligature marks, and no other immediate signs of excessive trauma.

Stepping over the dead body, Walaa reached into the wardrobe and picked up the camera. He examined it briefly and smiled. He held it up to his eye and looked through the viewfinder, centered his assistant in the frame, fiddled with the focusing ring and, for a moment, was very tempted to press the shutter release.

The Inspector owned a Practica very much like the one he now held, a 35mm single lens reflex. There was a flourishing black market trade in equipment such as this and in his professional capacity he had confiscated just such an item.

Subsequently, he had spent many an enjoyable hour learning, largely through trial and error, about f-stops and shutter speeds, framing and composition, and light levels and film stock. One of his shots, The Nile at Sunset, had been entered into a competition run by a Cairo newspaper and had even won a prize, albeit for first runner-up.

It was not a lack of enthusiasm that led Walaa to abandon his picture taking activities; it was frustration. Egypt was no place to practice photography seriously: too much dirt, too much dust, and too much sand. The entire country was virtually composed of grit. It worked its way into every crack and crevice, to such an extent that cleaning anything as complex as a single lens reflex camera became a nightmare. His Practica had let him down once too often. Now it languished at the bottom of a cupboard somewhere: unused and unloved, a forgotten relic from his past.

The Inspector examined the camera more closely. What was it doing in the wardrobe in the first place? The rest of Ellen Divine’s photographic equipment was laid out on the dressing table. If this had been a bungled robbery, then surely the intruder would have taken the camera? Although it was true that, with the advent of digital photography, traditional film cameras no longer commanded the high ticket prices that once made them amongst the most popular prizes for the casual burglar, they were still saleable, particularly to collectors and connoisseurs.

The Inspector tried advancing the film lever. It gave no resistance, so he felt confident there was no film loaded. He flipped open the back and was surprised to find that there was film still in the camera, but it had already been rewound into its canister. He extracted the roll carefully. Inspector Youssef looked down at the victim and sighed. He knew Ellen Divine, not personally, but by reputation. In her prime she had been one of Europe’s most respected photojournalists and her work had appeared in hundreds of magazines, periodicals, and newspapers. Half a dozen of Egypt’s most prominent businessmen and politicians had fallen foul of Ms. Divine at one time or another. There were a dozen more who might wish her silenced. Once the decision had been taken, finding an assassin was a simple affair; such a thing did not cost much in a place like Cairo. It was the reason why Walaa was not wholly surprised to find himself on the first floor of the Hotel Cleopatra staring at the dead body of Ellen Divine.

But that in itself was hardly a satisfactory explanation for Ellen Divine’s death. It was the location that most baffled the Inspector — a dark alley in the medieval quarter, well away from busy thoroughfares and prying eyes would have been much simpler and surely preferable. It was easy for a stranger to get waylaid in the narrow, winding streets around the Great Mosque, especially at night. In the noise and confusion no one would notice a woman being bundled down a side alley.

But here in the hotel? It didn’t make sense. The murderer would have to gain entry unchallenged, overpower the victim without disturbing anything, leave undetected . . . the problems outweighed any possible advantages. Unless Ms. Divine possessed something worth killing for; something that she kept in her room.

The Inspector handed the roll of film to Ali with instructions to get it processed immediately.

As soon as Ali was out of the room, Walaa conducted a thorough search of Ms. Divine’s belongings. Without some sort of inventory there would be no way of ascertaining what, if anything, was missing, but Walaa hoped there would be a clue amongst her possessions. Allahu a’alem, he needed one.

Ms. Divine’s purse was hanging on a hook behind the door. Walla checked the contents which included her passport, an opened packet of cigarettes, a lighter, and several hundred dollars in cash and Travellers Cheques. The intruder was clearly not after her money. There was also a letter from one of the low-cost British airlines confirming the details of her assignment — a photo spread for their in-flight magazine. Ellen Divine staying at the Cleopatra was proof enough that she had fallen on hard times; reduced to taking photos for a budget airline rather than chasing the rich and corrupt for a headline news story merely confirmed it.

Spread out on the dressing table by the window was the rest of her photographic equipment: a spare camera body, a tripod, an electronic flash, and a selection of lenses and filters. There were a few boxes of transparencies: pyramids, mosques, bazaars . . . the usual tourist sites, certainly nothing incriminating. The heavily depleted bottle of duty-free Scotch and an empty glass on the bedside table was evidence only of Ms. Divine’s hard drinking reputation.

A suitcase containing the rest of Ms. Divine’s belongings was propped open on the luggage rack beside the wardrobe — she had not bothered to unpack her clothes. In the bottom of the suitcase Walaa found a notebook filled with page after page of tightly written script. Walaa’s command of English was good, but even so, deciphering the handwriting was a task greater than he was prepared to tackle this early in the day. He would get Ali to précis its contents. It was unlikely to reveal anything essential to the case. If it had been important, it wouldn’t still be in the room; the murderer would have made sure of that.

In the bathroom, Walaa found only an unexceptional array of toiletries and washing accoutrements laid out neatly — no doubt due to the efforts of the maid (Ms. Divine did not seem the sort of person to be overly concerned with neatness).

Walaa shook his head. In twenty years as a detective he had never seen a murder scene quite like this — it was odd, perverse . . . it didn’t make sense. And the Inspector was discomfited by situations that didn’t make sense. He scrutinised the room once again, searching for clues. Just one clue, perhaps, that would help him crack this case. He would crack it, that much was certain. After all, he had a reputation to uphold.

Perhaps the undeveloped film in the camera would provide the answers? And yet, if it contained incriminating evidence, surely the assassin would have checked the camera first?

Two police officers arrived to assist with the investigation. Walaa instructed them to make sure that the forensic team checked every surface, every object, every dusty lintel and shelf for fingerprints, and to arrange for the body to be transported to the pathology department. There was so little evidence in the room that one thing was clear: whatever his identity, the assassin had been a consummate professional. Walaa did not expect forensics to uncover anything, but he would be shirking his duty if he left any stone unturned.

Having set the wheels in motion, Walaa retired to a nearby coffee house for a late breakfast and a much needed cigarette. As he entered the dark, smoke-filled Shakra coffee house — a noted den of the criminal fraternity — Walaa became aware of a certain tension in the air. It was not an unfamiliar experience. There were few criminals in Cairo who had not, at one time or another, enjoyed the Inspector’s company (albeit in circumstances they would probably rather forget). This explained why half a dozen of the city’s most active petty thieves stealthily headed for the back door as the Inspector came in through the front. Not that he cared; the small time crooks were no use to him. It was the racketeers and hoods that Walaa needed, and they ran from no one. Walaa felt sure that someone in the Shakra would be able to offer him some information. After all, he was owed a few favours.

No sooner had he sat down, a waiter appeared with a cup of the Inspector’s favourite thick, black coffee and set it down in front of him. The heady aroma wafted into the stale, smoky air. The Inspector nodded his approval;