The Society of Misfit Stories Presents... (September 2022)

By Julie Ann Dawson, Maria Arena, Apu Das and 5 more

Each issue of The Society of Misfit Stories Presents… is a celebration of long-form fiction. These novelettes and novellas will entertain and surprise fans of the form. 

 

Here is a sample of what you will find in this issue:

 

The interrogation of a revenant by a priest takes an ominous turn in Brillante and Night's Dark Master.

A campaign worker on a simple voting drive uncovers a terrifying local secret in When the Hunters Prowl the Night.

A young girl decides to test the truth behind local fables in The Old Man of the Mountain.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bards and Sages Publishing
• Release date: Sep 6, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215623343

Julie Ann Dawson

Julie Ann Dawson is an author, editor, publisher, RPG designer, and advocate for writers who may occasionally require the services of someone with access to Force Lightning (and in case it was not obvious, a bit of a geek). Her work has appeared in a variety of print and digital media, including such diverse publications as the New Jersey Review of Literature, Lucidity, Black Bough, Poetry Magazine, Gareth Blackmore’s Unusual Tales, Demonground, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and others. In 2002 she started her own publishing company, Bards and Sages. The company has gone from having two titles to over one hundred titles between their print and digital products. In 2009, she launched the Bards and Sages Quarterly, a literary journal of speculative fiction. Since 2012, she has served as a judge for the IBPA's Benjamin Franklin Awards.

Book preview

The Hut

By Maria Arena

UNCLE?

I glance at Isaac.

Tell me the story? His breath fogs, and there is a faint blueness to his lips, despite the scarf knitted by his mother, which is looped around his neck. In the corner of the hut, the wood pile is meagre. They never leave enough wood in the winter, nor enough water in the summer.

The path to salvation is laid bare through self-discipline.

I could—maybe should—light a fire. My fingers tingle with cold, and I imagine Isaac feels the same sensation in his extremities. But the night will be pitiless, and we must endure the afternoon in discomfort if we are to survive the tribulation ahead.

Above the entrance to the hut, the light is steady. Small as an eye and the color of envy, it taints everything around us with its greenness and with the awareness that we are caught in this place until it changes to red. Only then can we leave the hut and go on with living.

Suppressing a scowl—it’s impossible to tell when they’re watching—I avert my gaze from the light and give my attention to my nephew, who is waiting as expected, although I notice his hand has crept up to his biocol. The small incision where the implant was inserted is still fresh, and the heat that comes when the chip switches into scan mode can make the wound throb, especially the first time it sends a data-dump back to The Code’s servers. But, aside from the tentative touch to the base of his skull, my nephew bears up under the biocol’s intrusion admirably.

Isaac is a good boy: tall for his age and—curse his biology—early to the Onset. It is a trait common to our lineage, one that stretches back to the first Gen who came after the Departure. I try not to think of the boys and men before me who have spent their Onset in this hut, nor of the days I’ve spent here, one week a month, since my own Onset, nor of all the weeks ahead for Isaac. To muse on such things is pointless. We have no choice; we are duty-bound, generation to generation, to protect those we love from ourselves, until death comes for us or the Paeon return, which The Code assures us will happen, one day.

I don’t like to tell the story Isaac has requested. There is shame in our past and a lasting pain, which the Paeon explained before they left, was brought about by our immaturity as a species. Still, the telling would be an excuse to bring the boy close, to share the heat of our bodies, and deflect his anxiety over the snowstorm. And, of course, there is the novelty of having my nephew share the hut with me. Usually I would be banished alone, but circumstances conspired and here we are, together. So, perhaps a story is the least I can do for him. I open the blanket wrapped around my shoulders, inviting him to sit beside me.

At eleven, Isaac is still boy enough to jump from his seat at the table, a smile brightening his face as he scrambles over to me, which seems to lighten the dreary room that is ours for the next six days. Yet, even as he crosses the concrete floor, I see the knowledge of why we’re in the hut rise in his eyes and, by the time he reaches me, some of his joy has subsided. He sits beside me, somber with respect, keeping an appropriate distance between us. It’s a sign of the man he’ll become, and it breaks my heart, a little.

Don’t grow up too fast, I want to say, but that would confuse him, so I shuffle over and pull him close. Delight and dismay wrestle across his face as he looks at me. I draw the blanket around us. Warmer, I say, and feel him relax. Where should I begin? The question is perfunctory: a key to open the past.

Bemusement flickers across Isaac’s face. At the beginning.

Yes, where else?

His brown eyes, inherited from his mother—who was once my sister—gather the grey daylight that seeps around the door, despite my efforts to seal the hut. The light seems to make his eyes glitter with eagerness, as though we are a family ready to celebrate Arrival Day, and not a man in mid-life and a boy tipping into the Onset, exiled to a freezing hut on the edge of a snow-bound forest, who, in truth, scarcely know each other. That glitter ignites an unexpected warmth in my chest, and I want to ruffle my nephew’s hair, but I’m not sure how such affection would sit with him, after everything that happened with his father.

The beginning, huh? Okay, but only because we’ll be here for a while.

I wince inside: As if he needs reminding.

Isaac appears unfazed. In the beginning, he prompts.

With a nod, I pick up the story. There was only one, but in the months that followed, a starship was docked over every city with more than three million people, infiltrating their communication systems. Soon, our screens were jammed with their message: Change or Perish.

Isaac is shaking his head. Not that beginning, Uncle Daniel.

I peer down at him with a quizzical frown. Is there another beginning you want to hear about then? I ask, but I already know. He wants his origin story, which is to say, the story of his parents. The request isn’t surprising after all that’s transpired over the last few months; his world shattered, everything and everyone he knows gone. Except for me. The uncle who has been on the periphery but present enough to know some of the facts of his life; those small anchors that might get him through the lonely days and years ahead.

Suppressing a sigh, I ponder Isaac’s request. Although the story he wants me to tell has my sister as its central character, I find myself reluctant to start; it would be better to meander through tales of the Arrival and the Departure. Those stories are safer because time has given them the mistiness of mythology, softening them somehow, while my sister’s story remains sharp and stings like an insult.

Were you there when my parents met? Isaac asks. His tone reveals the depth of his competing needs: to know, yet to respect. 

I could ease his anxiety, but I’m arrested by how little he understands. I was there when his parents met, but more damning, I was the one who orchestrated their meeting, which means, ultimately, I’m responsible for all that came after. In my defense, I acted out of love for Madeline, but still, I should have thought about the consequences of introducing her to Aaron, given what I knew about him.

What did your mother tell you about that day? I ask, stalling.

Isaac’s hand creeps to his biocol again as he considers. My own chip is warm and humming as it processes my data. I suppress a grimace. The chip doesn’t really hum, but I’ve always thought it should if only to make its presence in my body less insidious.

Mom said she was at a café with you when my father interrupted your conversation by asking her out on a date. She said she turned him down for being ‘boorish’.

The word makes me smile; it’s so Madeline and, in my memory, I hear it falling from her mouth, ripe with distain. Of course, if the barb had been aimed at any other man, he would’ve scurried off, but to Aaron, she had laid down the gauntlet.

I sigh, remembering the mischievousness in his grin.

If there was one thing I knew about my friend before that fateful meeting with my sister, it was that he lived to flout propriety. In fact, it was a transgression with a fellow student that had seen him transferred, with lightspeed efficiency, from UCB to DMAU for his final year of immunology. I didn’t know about ‘the incident’ when he dropped into the seat next to mine at our first lecture, but he did have an air about him—a cavalier turn of the mouth and a gaze that roamed inappropriately—that should’ve alerted me. I can only say his charm distracted me and, by the time I knew him well enough to understand his proclivities, it was too late. We were friends, and I’d begun to think he’d be a good match for my headstrong little sister, who would reign Aaron in and make a decent man of him.

I was wrong about that—the reigning in—but it took years to realize it.

There’s another day I remember with more clarity, I say to Isaac, and he shivers.

I don’t know if it’s from the cold, which is pressing in from all sides, or from talking about his parents. Likely it’s both. I pull the blanket tighter and nestle him closer as a fierce gust of wind barrels into the hut, rattling the walls. In its wake, snow clumps to the ground, thick and heavy as a bundle of wet clothing. I glance at the wood pile again, knowing that, if the wind and snow don’t ease soon, I’ll have to light the fire and hope we make it through the rest of the day and the night. And, tomorrow, when The Code’s acolytes arrive, I’ll need to plead the case for more wood and perhaps another blanket for Isaac.

I remember the day they fell in love.

Isaac stills. They did love each other then?

I believe so. I let him sit with the idea for a minute because it will be foreign to his experience of his parents, especially in the last months.

I lift my gaze to the green light, steady as ever but brighter too, and realize that the day beyond the hut is slipping into a deepening gloom. There is a bulb hanging over the table in the middle of the room; it’s light will be feeble—out here, everything is feeble—but I have no desire to sit in darkness while I tell tales from the past. I shrug out of the blanket, which I press around Isaac, and cross to the light switch. It’s icy under my fingers and I wonder if I’ve ever felt such profound cold before. Waves of shivers ripple through me. I rub at my arms and stamp my feet as the hut is suffused with a dull yellowish glow that reminds me of a beggar’s teeth. It looks unhealthy, as though tainted, but it pushes back the dimness and, for that, I’m grateful.

Mercy is in the small things.

Isaac opens the blanket for me, and I sit beside him, soaking up his warmth. He doesn’t urge me to go on with the story, but I make him wait no longer than it takes to swaddle us again. We worked in the same lab, your father, mother, and I, and it was on the day of the breakthrough that I believe they fell in love.

Madeline had been at Equinox for a year before Aaron and I landed jobs with the company. She’d been working on a serum that slowed the effects of the Onset, while, in our work with Equinox’s main competitor, FRE, we’d discovered an enzyme that, with a little manipulation, appeared to inhibit the virus’s activation altogether. The Code was informed and they, in their ever-polite way, suggested that bringing our research together was the ethically responsible thing for Equinox and FRE to do, for the benefit of all humankind, naturally.

Aaron couldn’t have been happier and, for the six months preceding the breakthrough, he did his best to woo my sister, but she was immersed in her work and seemed oblivious to his advances. I was impressed by her single-mindedness, but, at his trial, she confessed to me that she’d been losing the battle to resist him for weeks and, on the day of the breakthrough, looking at him over the microscopes with hope filling her heart, she’d felt her resistance crumble as the love she’d been denying flashed through her with an atomic heat.

In that moment, and for the only time in my life, I felt I was in the presence of the profound love that the Paeon spoke of before the Departure, I tell Isaac.

And, as it had then, a strange kind of fervor floods my body, one that defies the growing darkness eating the day beyond the hut and affirms that our presence in the hut is right and good: for we are serving that love and bringing humanity one step closer to the moment of the Paeon’s return and to the knowledge they promised will lead to our salvation, to humanity’s continued existence, instead of our certain extinction.

When I look at Isaac, I expect to see the same zeal on his face, but his expression is grave. Uncertainty flows over me. Perhaps speaking of love, especially in the wake of his father’s execution, was a misjudgment. I try to think of a topic that will change the direction of our conversation. Maybe we should recite The Collaboration together. No. Bad idea. The last time Isaac heard The Collaboration, his mother was taken up by The Code. I search my mind for something that would be of interest to an eleven-year-old boy, but my nephew saves me the trouble.

Do you think they really loved us? he asks.

Of course. You were—are—the light in their lives, I say, slipping an arm around his shoulders in what I hope is a reassuring manner. You mustn’t think that what happened between them, or with The Code, is an indication of their love for you. It wasn’t. Sometimes, things get complicated between people, and your parents’ relationship had always been fraught.

I stop talking.

He said ‘us’, didn’t he?

You mean the Paeon?

Isaac nods.

The rhetoric of The Code fills my mouth and I clench my teeth against it. After everything the boy has been through, he deserves a more nuanced response. But how do I explain all that the Paeon are, and what they did while they were here, and what we did to make them leave us to our fate, and all The Code has done in their name since the Departure? How do I explain this world we’ve created to a child who has suffered the death of his father and the taking up of his mother; the permanent separations he must endure to bring about the Return.

The task feels insurmountable.

I shrug out of the blanket and stand abruptly.

It’s time to light the fire, I say over another howl of wind. I wave my hand in Isaac’s direction. Cover yourself, lest you freeze to death before I can warm this place up. There’s a hard edge in my voice that shames me, but it’s a barrier to the boy’s question, a stop gap to give me time to think.

The corner where the wood is stacked is murky with gloom and the logs are saturated with cold. For one confounding moment, I’m sure someone has snuck into the hut and replaced the wood with camouflaged stalagmites. They won’t light, my mind whispers, as I stack the wood in my arms and lean it against my chest. Too cold to burn—but I must try, for the boy.

I turn to find Isaac at the fireplace, blanket cloaking his shoulders. He reaches into the kindling box, removes a small tuft of wood scrapings, and makes a nest in the center of the hearth. I place my stack of wood on the floor beside him and take the box of matches from the mantel, handing them to Isaac. His fingers shake as he strikes a match and holds it to the kindling. The flame hesitates and then bites hungrily into the tinder. Isaac passes me the matches, which I return to the mantel before sitting next to my nephew, who is busy adding more fuel to the nascent fire, giving it something to gnaw. The heat on my hands and face is wonderful, and I hunch in, even as the cold presses against my back. Isaac feeds the fire steadily, and I nod to myself. His father had taught him well. 

For a man who loved the order and sterility of his lab, Aaron was also a man of nature. From the early years of Isaac’s life, on those days when I’d call Madeline looking for her husband or just to chat, inevitably she would sigh and explain that ‘her boys’ were off in the woods again. She tolerated Aaron’s passion because there had been a time in his youth when he had been touted as the Manifestation. But, as it turned out, he wasn’t so much evolved as infatuated with nature’s myriad of mysteries. He wanted to solve nature and, by doing so, to understand how the slowing of our reproduction had transformed the biosphere and slowed the rampant extinction phase that humanity had been locked into before the Arrival. In his quest to know, he had nourished a similar love in his son, along with a deep self-reliance and trust in the natural world.

Watching Isaac nurture the fire, feeding it just enough to help it grow without exhausting itself, I see his father. Not the violator he became, nor the shrunken prisoner he was as they connected the nodes to his temples and plugged the inhibitor into his biocol, but a man of power, robust and vital, with a deep laugh that burbled like water passing over river stones. I hear that laugh in my mind and it soothes me as much as the fire at my fingertips. That was the man I trusted with my sister; the man who’d raised my gifted nephew. But the feeling doesn’t—can’t—persist because he was also the man who made my sister sterile, just to prove The Code wrong.

As the fire flourishes under Isaac’s hand, I wonder how his father felt on that day, when the test came back positive for infertility, and Madeline, who was his only hope for clemency, turned her back on him and entered the circle of The Code. I’d like to think he felt grief for what he was losing, but I know Aaron too well to entertain the fantasy for long. What he would’ve grieved was the lost chance to prove the truth, as he saw it, and thereby win back his wife and release male-kind from the chains imposed by The Code, in the name of the Paeon.

Isaac clears his throat, and I pull my gaze from the fire. I think now he’ll want an answer to his question about so-called our saviors, and I ready myself to tell him as much as I know, with all the honesty I can muster.

Will I see my mother again?

For a moment, I cannot answer him because it’s as if he’s heard my thoughts, and I’m intrigued and horrified at the same time. She’s gone into the Temple, and we are not permitted there.

But what if I need to tell her something?

I catch the childish lilt that colors his voice and reply as gently as I can. She is of The Code now. Her work is more important than our small needs.

But she’s my mother.

Although his tone doesn’t change, I notice that he shoves the next handful of kindling into the fire with a little more force than needed. The fire protests with a burst of sparks.

No, I say, placing a hand on Isaac’s shoulder, partly in comfort, but mostly as a warning. "She is The Code now, and The Code is our salvation."

He trembles and, when he looks at me, his eyes are bright with a hostility that is too blistering for a boy his age. My mouth dries. If we were anywhere else, at any other time, I might have flinched away from that look in surprise, but we’re in the hut and the light is green. Grabbing Isaac, I pull him into a rough hug, shifting to place my body between him and the oculus over the door.

Get control of yourself, boy, I say, close to his ear, firing each word like a pre-emptive strike. His trembling deepens to a quiver that grows so forceful I hear his teeth click together. Still, I hold him. Until the light is red, you will say nothing against The Code. Do you hear?

He mutters something inaudible into my chest, but I feel him nod. I ease my grip, but he doesn’t pull away, and I remember that, for all his anger, he is only a child: one who hasn’t felt a loving embrace for months. I soften further, stroking the back of his head as his quivering becomes the shaking of tears.

The fire diminishes while a storm of loss sweeps through Isaac. The cold sneaks forward to reclaim its lost ground, but I don’t move until my nephew draws away of his own volition, wiping his face with one hand as he goes back to tending the flames with the other. They leap up, sending a pulse of heat into the hut. Outside, the wind flings snow at the walls and they quiver too, as though sharing Isaac’s anguish.

When the gust passes, Isaac lifts his eyes to mine. I do have to tell her something, Uncle. Even though they say I can’t go where she is now, somehow, I will talk to her. He shrugs beneath the blanket and, as he stands, he glances at the light above the door before walking over to the bench that serves as a bed.

His words rock me for a second time, not because of their surety or defiance, but because I’ve heard them before, and I don’t dare look at my nephew because I know my face will be white with shock.

I WILL TALK TO HER, Aaron said on the morning of his execution.

I stood near the door and held my peace. The notion was farcical. Madeline was with The Code, and he’d made that inevitable. There was no redemption for his actions: my sister was beyond reach and, in two hours, he would be dead. Why waste words on pointless proclamations? 

Aaron paced the small cell, which was faintly green from the light over the lintel; it would turn red when it was time for him to face the executioner. The stresses of the last months had taken their toll on my former friend, yet he retained the spark and drive that had pushed us towards a serum that we hoped would immunize men and boys against the virus introduced into our species by the Paeon.

Our serum that had failed.

"If I could just talk to her, I could remind her that she was a scientist long before all this Sisters of