Demo

By Kevin A. Straight

Originally created by Kevin Straight as a holiday card for his friends and family, DEMO is an excellent introduction to his fiction work. The book contains four short stories: "The Phylactery", "Debt Slave", "Pete Kincaid and the Coin-op Oracle", and "Tea Time", spanning the genres of urban fantasy, post apocalyptic SciFi, and dystopian SciFi, as well as a brief preview of the upcoming literary novel "Handyman Road".

• Language: English
• Publisher: Creative Minority Productions
• Release date: Nov 11, 2016
• ISBN: 9781944327002

Kevin A. Straight

Kevin A. Straight is a freelance writer and blogger from Southern California.

Book preview

Kevin A. Straight

Creative Minority Productions

Montrose, CA

FIRST EDITION, 2015

Copyright 2015 by Kevin A. Straight

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No reproduction, copy, or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission except for brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address Creative Minority Productions, 1938 Waltonia Drive, Montrose, CA, 91020.

Creative Minority web site:

http://www.creativeminorityproductions.com

ISBN: 978-1-944327-00-2

This book was created using the LaTeX typesetting system.

Contents

Introduction

The Phylactery

Debt Slave

Pete Kincaid and the Coin-Op Oracle

Tea Time

Excerpts from Handyman Road

Introduction

I’ve always known a lot of people who were in bands–not famous bands, but the sort of band that is gigging regularly and everyone feels is sure to break out if it could just get some exposure and an agent. Back in the days of physical media, before music magically transmigrated to the Internet, most of them were constantly working on a demo disk (or tape, in my high school days) that would bring them the fame they deserved. At one point in my twenties I could hardly go to work in the morning without some coworker handing me their latest attempt, and the cab of my pickup developed drifts of CDs, hand lettered with permanent marker.

Writers and musicians have much in common, so much so that the ancient Greeks tended to lump us both together under the catch-all term poets. I offer this DEMO in a spirit of camaraderie with all my garage band friends, past and current. A good demo usually has four or five songs: enough to show off the band’s range, without giving away too much material for free. I hope that these stories show off my range. The ultimate goal of a demo is for it to somehow make it into the hands of an agent or record executive. If you happen to be a literary agent or publisher (or know one) then I hope that you, in particular, enjoy this collection. And finally, and most importantly, the demo is for the entertainment of friends and family of the band members. So, to all of you in my friends and family, I hope you enjoy this collection. There is much more to come in the future.

Liner Notes

As the old saw goes, Write about what you know. In keeping with this, The Phylactery is set in modern-day Riverside, CA near the campus of my alma mater and is a story about black magic, grad students, crime, and naked ambition.

Debt Slave, written a few days before I graduated, was also inspired, though in a different way, by my grad school experience. It is also by way of a tribute to author Harry Harrison, who left us in 2012. Harry was my favorite author at a time in my young life when I was first beginning to figure out what good SciFi was; I always wanted to write the kind of stories he did. You can judge how successful I was for yourself.

You might say that Pete Kincaid and the Coin-Op Oracle is a post-apocalyptic adventure story. I have issues with the term apocalypse as it is generally used in literature, however. It seems to connote a one time, final event. In real history civilization is constantly cycling up and down, and the most interesting stories seem to happen in the troughs. This story is the first of a series, at least two more of which are currently taking shape on my hardrive.

Tea Time is a shorter story than I usually write. I wrote the entire piece in a dream, which is not an unusual occurrence for me. What was unusual is that I managed to remember it the next morning and type it out.

And then, we have a preview of Handyman Road, a novel I have been writing (and rewriting) since 2010. It still isn’t done, but I feel like these early chapters are close to their final form. Handyman Road is my eulogy for the scandalous and squalid underworld of the Mountain Northwest of the late 1990’s. They say you can never go back–and I honestly wouldn’t want to–but sometimes I do miss it, even the ugly parts. I would like to state for the record that this is a work of fiction. However, many of the events actually happened to people I knew in those years.

The Phylactery

David twirled the little glass vile between his fingers as he waited for the poison to work. He let it slip and drop to the floor when he felt the first icy twinges creeping out from his stomach and crackling up his spine. It wasn’t painful, exactly, but neither was it pleasant. He allowed himself a smile. After years of planning the time was here. Power, invulnerability, and even immortality would be his. The only thing he had to do first was die.

The icy feeling was passing now, replaced by a strange numbness. Dots of blackness began to intrude around the edges of his sight. He waited a moment longer, feeling his own heart beat slow and stop. Timing was everything. Now! He breathed a single word of power—just one word in an ancient and unholy language—and crumpled to the floor. Or rather, his dead body crumpled to the floor. The word was a trigger, the last link in a network of mystic energies that was woven through the glyphs in the circle he had etched on the floor of his apartment after carefully tearing up the shag carpet. The spells ran inward, curling around the markings and amulets on his body, then converging on a large stone on a specially prepared alter. And so when David’s body died he did not go with it. Rather, he felt his consciousness lifted outward and upward before being pulled towards the stone which received his energies.

He floated bodiless and unbounded above the stone. So far the ritual was going extraordinarily well.

He waited for the second stage of his spell to activate. It seemed like a great deal of time had passed, yet he had no idea how long. Too much of human time-sense was connected to biological processes. With no body, he could not tell if minutes had passed or hours. He couldn’t panic. He would not panic. Mental discipline was the first lesson a necromancer learned. He forced himself into a simple mental exercise he hadn’t needed in years. Any moment now his time delayed spells would reanimate his body and he would take control.

But nothing happened. He tried to investigate. He had no eyes, nor any physical senses, yet he was more aware of magical energies than he had ever been. The stone, his phylactery, was like a fiery beacon directly below him. He pushed his awareness outward to the circle and beheld it not as a physical drawing