To Dream the Blackbane: A Novel of the Anomaly

By Richard J. O'Brien

A cosmic event in 2015 fused earth with the faerie realm. Scientists refer to the event as the Anomaly. A byproduct of the Anomaly was the advent of hybrid beings - people who became mixed with whatever animal or object was nearest them the moment the Anomaly occurred. Humans, or Pedigrees, soon relegated fairy refugees and hybrids into ghetto z

• Language: English
• Publisher: Between the Lines Publishing
• Release date: Dec 29, 2018
• ISBN: 9781732172333

Richard J. O'Brien

Richard J. O'Brien lives in New Jersey. He served as an infantryman in the 101st Airborne Division,  attended Rutgers University, and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Fairleigh Dickinson University. As a boy, Richard accidentally slow-boiled his tropical fish one winter day when he left the tank heater set too high before going off to school. He's happy to report that the two kittens in his life are alive and well. 

Book preview

To Dream the Blackbane:

A Novel of the Anomaly

Between the Lines Publishing

Published by Between the Lines Publishing (USA)

410 Caribou Trail, Lutsen, Minnesota 55612, USA

www.btwnthelines.com

Copyright © 2018 Between the Lines Publishing. All Rights Reserved

Cover artist: Suzanne Johnson

Editor: Tamara Beach

To Dream the Blackbane: A Novel of the Anomaly

Paperback:  978-1-7321723-5-7

Digital book: 978-1-7321723-3-3

This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopied, recorded or otherwise), without the prior written consent of the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for insertion in a magazine, newspaper, broadcast, website, blog, or other outlet.

Early Praise for To Dream the Blackbane

A futuristic American Gothic dark fantasy about a gumshoe who can’t say no, even though at times, he ought to. Delightful!— Chanticleer Review

A compelling, original tale with a strong narrative voice…—Kirkus Review

This book is dedicated to the memory of Roger Zelazny whose books and stories taught me all about imagination, myth, and storytelling.

PROLOGUE

One night, the stars went out. When they came back twenty-four hours later, the world witnessed new constellations. The year was 2015. Scientists called the event The Anomaly back then, and the name stuck. Before long, they found out that the new constellations weren't the only product of The Anomaly.

Seventy years later, the debate continues between scholars about whether Earth herself, along with the solar system, remains in the same universe. In addition to the new constellations, one-third of Earth was shaved off—from Mongolia down over Greece and points south—and replaced with new lands. The satellites that once orbited Earth all vanished. Efforts were made in vain to launch new satellites into orbit, but none survived.

In the early days there was no way of knowing whether that chunk of the world had been obliterated, or if the land and its people—and a good chunk of the ocean—had been transported to a non-local plane. That’s what the scientists called it. A non-local plane. It was accepted as fact that the walls between realities had weakened. What no one could prove was how all of this had happened. As for everyone on the missing side, no one ever heard from them again.

In some places around what was left of the world there were holes, gateways leading into different dimensions. Between these new dimensions and the old world lay the borderlands, boundaries separating humanity and post-Anomaly hybrids from the faerie realm. Many humans—pedigrees, as they came to be known, unaffected by The Anomaly—took refuge in these new realms. They believed in a kind of manifest destiny, that those parallel places hospitable to them offered a new way of life—an improvement over the world they had known, given to them through divine providence. Likewise, a great number of inhabitants from the faerie realm came through the borderlands and migrated to the cities as well as the countryside.

In Germany, trolls took back the Black Forest. Throughout the American Southwest, as well as in the Outback of Australia, portals into the Dreamtime remained permanently open. I once read about a guy who had driven to work the day after The Anomaly only to vanish for thirty-five years. The man, having not aged a day, walked out of the woods in Nova Scotia one early morning with an Elf family in tow; he and his family, an elvish wife and three little halflings, settled in Pugwash Junction and bought a farm with gold.

Closer to home, there’s a guy in Southside Chicago, a stone mason, who became part of the cathedral he and his crew had been working on. They say if you go down there at night you can still hear the guy singing. All you have to do is look up at the northwest corner of the roof. There’s a gargoyle there. Only it’s not a gargoyle. It’s the stone mason who became fused with the cathedral that sings. But that’s not the worst The Anomaly had to offer…

Right now, a war rages in Zanzibar—humans and hybrids alike, fighting side by side, against a legion of Popobawa. The United Nations declared open season on these demonic creatures, but they aren’t easy to kill. UN troops, Christian, Jew, and Muslim alike, have been issued Korans, as this seems to be the only defense against the creatures. The Popobawa can disguise themselves as humans during the day. The body count continues to grow, and there's no sign of the war ending any time soon.

Paranoia runs deep in that part of the world. So far, the war has been contained there. Mythologists and anthropologists working closely with the UN believe that the Popobawa are inexplicably tied to that region. Still, there’s no telling what the future holds for Tanzania.

In America there are many zones that humans and hybrids have learned to avoid. To wander beyond these zones is risky. The worst of the borderlands beyond the safe zones exist in the southern states; Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Louisiana got it the worst.

The western states, California north to Washington—and parts of Arizona and Nevada—were deemed the safest place in the world. And the government-funded militia groups made sure it stayed that way. The central states, including Illinois and my hometown of Chicago, became the new Mecca for all who had once been normal. People—pedigrees for the most part—flocked there in droves in the early days following The Anomaly. The result was a regular refugee crisis. Rents were reduced to almost nothing.  Not long after that, they fenced off the entire Southside. Hybrids and others who no longer were qualified as Homo sapiens were forced to live there or be killed. We were the new minority, even though our numbers were greater than the unaffected who took power. It was an old story. Nothing ever changes.

After The Anomaly, most major cities followed Chicago's example. Whole neighborhoods in Philadelphia, Atlanta, New York, Houston, and other cities were fenced off. Hybrids were relegated to these new ghettos. We were able to work wherever we wanted—provided we had papers to show at various checkpoints—but we could not live outside the ghettos.

History had always been a hobby of mine. In fact, back when I was in school, it was the only subject in which I excelled. My thirst for history made me an oddball in the Chicago Police Department back when I joined the force. Those days, however, are long gone. I retired after twenty-five years on the job and opened a private detective business.

Anyway, I returned to Southside Chicago after my last job: a missing persons gig that took me down south into the heart of dangerous territory. It was a bona fide doozy of a job. Over time, ever since I had opened my practice, I had worked some strange cases, even by post-Anomaly standards. But it was the last two cases that ended my private investigator career.

The story you're about to read chronicles those events. I wrote this account for two reasons: first, I wanted a record of what drove me to leave my beloved city; secondly, I wanted this to serve as a warning to anyone out there in the post-Anomaly world thinking about getting into the private investigator business. A word of advice: avoid contact with changelings, and no matter how much they are willing to pay you, never take on vampires as clients.

~ PART ONE ~

The Lady in the Red Dress

&

The Vampire Business

~ One ~

Gloomtown: Chicago after the big change.

Take a stroll down any street and you're bound to run into hybrids like me—along with faerie creatures just trying to make a living.

Every day at noon, a six-armed goddess flies past my office window on a flying carpet. In the evening, the elevated trains are crammed with demonic office workers and construction Orcs alike.

This is the new reality. It's been this way going on nearly a century.

Children play in parks with winged faeries. Old couples stroll around at twilight walking pet shug monkeys.

From Lower West Side to points north stand castles that defy the laws of physics and burial mounds that give off strange phosphorescent lights of varying hues at dawn and dusk.

Valkyries and vampires battle one another nightly for prime high-rise real estate. Sometimes, humans get in the way. I can't get to my office without having to walk around broken, bloodied bodies hurled from such vast heights.

This is life after The Anomaly. It's the same all over the world. And there hasn't been any indication that things will return to the way they were in the old days before the great change.

The scientists tell us that The Anomaly happened in deep space, and the ripple that ensued changed everything forever. Over the course of a single day, two worlds collided—the physical and the fantastical, the world we took for granted and the world of make-believe. That was seventy years ago.

My name is Wolfgang Rex. I am a private detective. Once upon a time I’d been a police lieutenant. After twenty-five years of service to the city of Chicago, I retired in 2063 and opened Chi-town Detectives, a private investigation firm.

I’m what they call in the medical books a second-generation Anomalous cross-breed. My father was a cop like me. One night he was out walking his dog, a Rhodesian Ridgeback named Rex. My mother hated that dog. After she died, I learned that she had always wished that Rex would meet some unfortunate demise. She got her wish on the night of The Anomaly. My father came home from his walk without the dog—in a manner of speaking. For lack of a better term, he and the dog had fused. And the result was a humanoid, with a hairy body, a tail, and the head of his old dog Rex. My mother was horrified, but my parents were both Catholic. So, they stuck it out. I was born in the tenth year of The Anomaly. When I was a kid, my mother used to read me fairy tales. She died before I finished high school. So it goes, like Kurt Vonnegut once wrote. I turned out to be the spitting image of my father post-Anomaly. I lucked out with being born without a tail. My father had somehow managed to keep his human vocal cords. My face was less hairy than his, but our snouts were nearly identical.

Learning to speak with a dog's mouth was tricky when I was coming up, but I eventually got the hang of it. And thank Christ I’d been born with opposable thumbs; otherwise, I would’ve starved to death a long time ago. Still, given that many people melded with inanimate objects—much like that poor bastard who became a stone gargoyle—I constantly considered myself lucky. My father cursed his lot for the rest of his life. Some people, like my old man, never learned to adjust.

Life after The Anomaly wasn't so bad. My old man died while I was in the police academy. Trust me, it was for the best. He used to smoke like a chimney. Toward the end of his life, I could hear him wheeze as he slept in his room. That year I joined the force was the first year they let in hybrids like me. How lucky. My law enforcement career was a tough one, but I was no hero. For a little while, I was married to a pedigree woman, one of those people whose families were unaffected by The Anomaly. It didn't last. I didn't miss her.

The government, in its infinite wisdom, began doling out new names to all the second-generation hybrids. So I became Wolfgang Rex. We were given the option to choose a name. To honor my old man's Rhodesian Ridgeback, I used his dog's name as my surname. It was the least I could do. The government didn't care. In their eyes, I was no longer Arthur Wolfgang. In truth, they didn't exactly know what I was.

My home and my business were relocated to the Southside. Despite being placed in a hybrid ghetto along with others like me, I had steady work. In the early days I focused on the positive. For one, my commute was much shorter. City government gave me papers to travel about the city and into other states. But some hybrids weren't so lucky. Others couldn't travel if they had wanted to.

In Florida, there was a dolphin trainer who changed into a winged sea creature. Her name was Dippy Roscoe, and she spearheaded a faction who lobbied for free range travel for all hybrids. No Papers, No Checkpoints. That was their motto. Peaceful protest on their part never got enough attention; so, they took a page out of the Weather Underground's playbook from the early 1970s and began bombing various federal buildings. The Free Liberation Army—or FLA, as Dippy Roscoe's group referred to themselves whenever they issued a communiqué concerning their indiscriminate bombing campaign—weren’t professional revolutionaries. Some of their bombs killed people. One morning in April 2035, a ragtag bunch of pedigree nationalists who called themselves the Anti-hybrid Coalition for Emancipation Suppression kidnapped Dippy Roscoe from her lake home in Pensacola. The ACES members took her aboard a charter boat equipped with an industrial wood chipper on deck, and after they ran out of beer halfway to Havana, turned Dippy Roscoe into chum.

No hybrid in the South was safe after that. Eventually, ACES was deemed a terror organization by the federal government. By 2050, their membership had fizzled as hybrids fought back. Hybrid suicide bombers stormed churches, Wal-Marts, gun stores, Elks Lodges, and anywhere else ACES members were said to congregate. Suicide bombers were said to utter Dippy Roscoe Lives! just before they detonated their devices. By 2060, ACES became a thing of the past like the Bolshevik Party. Pedigree prejudice against hybrids like me never abated, but the wholesale slaughter of hybrids and pedigree nationalists alike eventually became passé. 

My own troubles began in earnest the night I set out to meet with a client to show him some surveillance photos I had taken for him. His name was Gaylord Knuckles Mouser—just a small-time crook and former amateur boxer. If it hadn't been for old Mouser, I might have avoided the vampires altogether when they called on me at my office. Instead, I went to see Mouser. If I hadn't gone to see him, maybe the lady in the red dress wouldn't have hired my services either. Fate had a funny way of fucking you over. I might have avoided the whole mess if Mouser hadn't owed me money for services rendered, but I had to collect my fee all the same. After all, I wasn't running a charity foundation.

~ TWO ~

The name of the joint was Hophead's House of Blues.

Every night of the week—except for Sundays when the blues bar was closed—Gil the Gorilla manned the front door.

As fellow hybrids go, Gil was okay. Before The Anomaly, he’d been a maintenance worker at the Chicago Zoo. I didn't know his whole story, nor did I care to really learn more, to be honest, because in Gloomtown there were thousands of stories like Gil's. No exaggeration. Suffice it to say, Gil looked every inch like a silverback gorilla. The only features he managed to keep were his human nose and ears. And neither of them did him much good since Gil was plagued all year long by severe allergies. I’d never seen so much streaming earwax and snot in my life. I felt bad for him, not so much about the allergy thing as the fact Gil was getting up there in years, and he was still bouncing. One gift that hybrids and their offspring enjoyed was longevity; on average, we lived longer than pedigrees. Still, who wanted to work until death?

That night Gil was dressed in black slacks, a black turtleneck shirt, and he carried a handkerchief in his left hand. As I approached the entrance, he wiped his nose once before jamming a thick finger into his right ear.

Evening, Mr. Rex, Gil said as he opened the door for me.

The crowd inside was thin, just a few human women and a dozen or so hybrids. The band on stage, a four-piece, was finishing a set when I spotted Mouser seated in a booth toward the rear of the club. He wore a sorry-looking excuse for a suit. The shoulder pads were gigantic, the sleeves too short. In the dim light, the suit looked black. Mouser, however, wore only one color: charcoal gray. It was rumored that he owned ten suits of the same color and the jackets all had those ridiculously large shoulder pads sewn into them.

Rex, muttered the human-rodent. What news do you have for me?

None, Gaylord…unless you fork over some cash.

Call me Knuckles. That's my name.

Your mother named you Gaylord. I will call you that unless, of course, you want me to call you an ambulance instead?

Mouser reached into his suit jacket. Around Southside, Mouser had developed a reputation for being a small-time gangster, running numbers and such. I knew he carried a pistol. He knew I'd bite his snout clean off before he could ever draw a bead on me. His whiskers twitched as he grinned. Then he pulled an envelope out and handed it to me.

It's all there, he declared.

I placed a folder on the table. In it were a dozen photographs of Mouser's wife Doreen, a feline-human hybrid. Mouser had come to my office one afternoon a month beforehand and was convinced that his wife was having an affair. He wanted proof. So, I followed her. In the photographs, Doreen was caught in some compromising positions with her pedigree lover—a blond-haired college boy who looked to have spent some considerable time at the gym.

Fucking bitch, seethed Mouser. He closed the folder and put it on the table. I knew it.

Don't do anything stupid, I told him.

Do I not look intelligent?

Sure, I answered. You're a regular Rhodes Scholar.

You think you're such a big shot!

A waitress approached our table. She was a leggy brunette, all human from the looks of her. I waved her off.

Man, I said, what I wouldn’t give to hump that.

Forget it, Mouser quipped. "She's a purist."

Come again?

Her name's Roxanne, he said. And she only dates humans.

I tapped the folder. She's not the only one, I informed him.

Why don't you go lick your own asshole, Mouser said. If I was a regular Joe, you wouldn't treat me like this.

You're right, but then you'd never come into the ghetto to give me your business.

"I meant connected."

Right. How is the Jackal these days?

Not good, man, Mouser said. You should stop by the home and see him. Maybe you two can reminisce about the old days.

Eddie Bats Corrigan, aka the Jackal, had been a mid-level player in the Irish mob—or what was left of it—back when I had been with the organized crime unit. I sent him up to Joliette for a stretch after I caught him with a trunkful of automatic weapons along Lakeshore Drive. They used to call him Bats behind his back because his crew said there were no more bats in the belfry. In other words, Eddie Bats was crazy. He was that, and he was also fairly stupid as I recalled.

Corrigan was just fifteen years old when The Anomaly happened. That was the day he became the Jackal. He was another one graced with a long life, a by-product of The Anomaly for hybrids everywhere. At the moment of the great change, my old acquaintance was banging his high school sweetheart, Sari. Rumor had it that Sari was into stuffed animals. Lucky for her, Corrigan had just rolled off her and onto one of her toy dogs the moment everything changed.

Fuck Eddie Bats and the old days, I proclaimed.

I'll be sure to tell him, said Mouser.

He still can't walk?

You try going around on legs with plastic pellets for bones!

Regardless, I hear he's doing well in the ghetto.

It's still the Southside, he reminded me.

When someone erects a fifty-foot-high fence around a neighborhood and monitors who goes in and who goes out, I told him, then it's a ghetto in the literal sense of the word.

If I made you an offer to do some extra work, Mouser began, would you take it?

You want to tune up your lady, I said, that's your business. You want my advice?

Not really.

Use your money for a decent divorce lawyer.

She's dead, Rex, Mouser shouted. That's all there is to it.

I slid out of the booth. Over by the bar, Gil the Gorilla was eyeballing me.

What are you going to do, Mouser? I asked. Throw her off a building and blame the Valkyries?

For a tubby hybrid, Mouser moved fast. He was out of the booth and facing me before I knew it. When he grabbed the lapels of my suit jacket, I didn't make a move.

Not a bad idea, Rex, said Mouser.

It was about to get ugly, but then he saw Gil the Gorilla making his way over to the booth. Mouser let go. Gil had a zero-tolerance policy for any roughhousing in the club. And I was in no mood to get my arms ripped from their sockets, so I beat it right out of there.

~ THREE ~

When I got back to my office, my assistant, Sally Sandweb, was flittering all over the waiting area. Sally was one of those rare specimens straight from the unknown realm who came to Chicago after The Anomaly. She stood just over three feet tall. On her back were large wings colored blue and black that looked like they’d been spun from a spider. Sally wasn't much for clothing, but during business hours she wore a pale blue shift over green-tinged skin.

I'm sorry, boss, she said, performing a figure-eight as she spoke. I tried to stop them, but they just barged right in.

Who did? I asked.

Sally landed on her desk. Her dark purple eyes narrowed; her lips pursed.

Vampires, she hissed.

Stay here, I told her.

I should go with you, Sally argued. They can't kill me.

If vampires wanted to kill me, I told her, they could do so on the street.

Against Sally's protests, I went into my office alone.

Two vampires sat in the armchairs that faced my desk. One of them studied a jar that was filled with strips of beef jerky—my favorite snack—which I kept on my desk. In the past, I tried to take up smoking, but every time I lit up a cigarette, I ended up in a crazy sneezing fit. Beef jerky had rescued me. In my line of work, it was better not to take it personally when a client declined a strip, and they almost always did.

Gentlemen, I said as I walked around the desk and sat down. How may I help you this evening?

I almost greeted them with Good evening, like Bela Lugosi in that old Dracula movie. I’m glad that I didn't. The two vampires looked Old World to me. The one on the left had long, dark hair that was braided. His associate was blonde, also long-haired, with a perfectly trimmed Van Dyke beard. Until that night I'd never seen a vampire up close. The two seated before me

Reviews for To Dream the Blackbane

[plappen_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This novel takes place on an altered present-day Earth. The Anomaly has opened portals between Earth and the faerie/paranormal realm. It also caused people to be fused with whatever animal or thing was closest to them at that moment. Pure humans, called pedigrees, have relegated fairy refugees and hybrids into ghettos.Wolfgang Rex is a retired Chicago police detective who is part dog. He is now a private investigator who has been hired by a couple of vampires to retrieve an ancient scroll. At the same time, Charlotte. a pedigree woman, wants him to travel to very rural Louisiana to exorcise a headless demon from her house.Of course, it is not that easy. Wolfgang falls for Charlotte, and the vampires demand results. They make it clear that failure to find the scroll is not an option. Can Wolfgang stay alive long enbough to find the scroll, while his friends are killed by the vampires? Do Charlotte and Wolfgang live happily ever after?This one is a first-rate piece of writing. The author explains The Anomaly in the first few pages to instantly get the reader interested. The story is full of strange creatures, good world-building and some really good writing. Detective story fans will love this book.