Jigsaw World Read online

  Jigsaw

  World

  JD Lovil

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  Smashwords Edition

  Jigsaw World

  Copyright © 2014 J D Lovil.

  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 recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please find it on your favorite online bookstore and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  PUBLISHED BY:

  JD Lovil on Smashwords

  ISBN: 9781311239143

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  DISCLAIMER:

  Jigsaw World is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and events are fictitious and are purely the product of the Author's imagination.

  Any resemblance of the persons, events or locations depicted in this book to those of events, locations or actual persons, living or dead, are entirely coincidental.

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  Also by JD Lovil

  Fiction

  Worldship Praxis

  Shadow of Worlds

  Vanguard of Man

  The Worlds of Man

  Non-Fiction

  Becoming Libertarian

  Tools for the Road

  Whacking Happiness

  Unknown Visitors

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  CONTENTS

  1 Dark Storms

  2 Claws in the Night

  3 The Burning Man

  4 Meet the Wolf

  5 Puddled People

  6 Summoning the Great Old One

  7 The tortured Undead

  8 The Eternal City

  9 Two Souls One Body

  10 Here lies Betsy the Cow

  11 Of Sand and Dragons

  12 All Gods Fade

  13 Big Foot, Bad Smell

  14 Where Time grows Younger

  15 A Day of Rest

  16 The Tourists

  17 The Chaos Sea

  18 Infinite reflections

  19 Reunion

  20 Thunderbirds and Dragons

  21 The Coming

  22 The Shriving

  23 The Waiting

  24 The Gathering

  25 The Seed of Creation

  26 The Book of Eternity

  27 The Staff of Infinity

  28 The Stone of reality

  29 The Party

  30 Far Away

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  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I have been influenced in subject matter by a number of Science Fiction writers over the years, and you will see elements of style of some of my favorites in my writing. There may also have been an unconscious attempt to pattern the general format of the quest in this book after the examples I have read, with tidbits from 'The Hobbit' and even from 'American Gods'.

  Ebook cover was provided by Author Marketing Club.

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  1 Dark Storms

  Tom stared out of the window at the approaching storm. He was lucky to have found this shelter, even if he was currently sharing it with four other refugees from the weather. The clouds were weaving strange patterns in the sky as they sought their prey along the highway.

  As the clouds roiled above, one could see faces in the shapes above, some almost human, others, not so much. Nobody that Tom had ever talked to could explain the obvious intelligence and predatory nature of storms these days. On the other hand, everyone who could see knew that being caught out in the storm was certain death.

  The storm was focusing in on a delivery truck, which was traveling at high speed down the nearby highway, moving directly toward this stone house that Tom was watching from. The clouds twisted above the truck like tentacles or worms, the strong gusting wind was rocking the vehicle from side to side in its headlong flight, and the lightning strikes were getting closer and closer to their target.

  Tendrils of the dark clouds and the vehicle converged less than a thousand feet from the door of the shelter. The lightning that was generated by the cloud was released in a second upon contact with the truck; a glaring arc like the world’s biggest arc welder lit the rapidly darkening world. The truck seemed not so much to blow up as to vaporize.

  Tom turned away from the window as the cloud tendrils were being reabsorbed back into the parent clouds, and the clouds began to drift lazily about in the sky in a lazy interlude before finding their next target. The pretty little blonde teenager named Nancy was huddled in the far corner of the room with her mother, Susan, and the bald and portly Gilbert Taylor sat nonchalantly on the couch drinking the hooch of whoever owned this house. The serious expression on Bailey’s face put the lie to the idea that dogs, at least collie-shepherd mixes, were incapable of higher thought and the resultant concerns that higher thought brings.

  Tom had been traveling about the countryside the last few months, a very unusual habit in these troubling times, but Tom was an unusual man, and quite possibly troubled to boot. Most people stuck close to home these days, ready to bolt for safety at the first sign of trouble. Everyone had a knot in their stomachs about the future, even though most did not know why.

  Not that Tom was in any way a peculiar man. While it was true that he seemed to have a nose for when one of these activities was going to happen, this was in no way a unique ability. Somewhere between one in ten and one in twenty of the people he had met had this ability to some degree. What made him a bit unusual was that he depended on it. The others always seemed to distrust their nose, and stayed in ‘safe’ areas most of the time. The other people in this house must have been caught short of safety. Lord knows why Bailey was here.

  Tom could feel that the danger was over for the moment. When the events were about to happen, he could feel that the world was thinner, as though it were a painting by an unknown artist god, and the time and place where the event was about to happen was where the brush had laid down a thinner coat of paint. Sometimes, when the temperature was in that niche between cold and hot, and was 72 degrees in an almost warm spring day, it would suddenly begin to feel chilly like the 72 degrees in an almost cold autumn day.

  He continued through the living room where the others huddled, and searched the kitchen until he found a decent bottle of single malt scotch whiskey. Feeling slightly cheered by the discovery, he returned to the living room with the bottle and some glasses, Bailey trotting by his side. It was not too hard to convince Susan to partake of the hooch, and oddly enough, she didn’t object when Tom poured a shot of whiskey for Nancy.

  Ten minutes found a Susan that looked much more relaxed, and Nancy was showing a bit of redness in her complexion, and an animated but slightly unfocused activity. Gilbert was well ahead of all of them on the road to inebriation, having started first and never stopped. In these strange days, this sort of communal reaction to the events was par for the course.

  “So, do you two live in Paradise Valley?” Tom asked. “I never have understood that name, it is definitely not Paradise, and it doesn’t seem to be a valley, except by comparison to Camelback Mountain.”

  “Yeah, we live off of Tatum.” Nancy said. “We had car trouble, and then we saw this house just before the clouds came in. It is alright here, I guess. It is probably someone’s idea of Paradise, compared to downtown Phoenix, anyway.”

  “I guess. You are lucky to have made it here. Well stocked, safe, and undefended. We all better lay low here until daylight.” Tom replied. “It doesn’t feel like things are totally over out there.”

  Nancy had started doing all of those strange woman signs that girls seem to pick up by the time they are two, handling their ha
ir, that oddly feminine eye dance and small smile quirks, upward escalation to the vocal registry. The fact that she was of that physical sort where one couldn’t be sure if she was thirteen or seventeen didn’t exactly square with the promise of that scared little smile she was putting out there.

  Tom would have expected her mother to have been the one to come on to him, but there she was, delivering a thousand mile stare into the little shot of whiskey she was nursing. Oh, well, the world was a little more accommodating in these areas than it used to be, but Tom didn’t intend on letting this little pubescent drama go any further. Fortunately, all he had to do to stop it was nothing.

  This little gang of desperados was a bit special, in that they could see what was happening around them. Even Bailey was special that way, even though animals did seem to sense these events a bit more than humans did. Humanity-at-large would attribute the results of falling prey to the storm by the delivery man as simply a bad traffic accident, for some reason never seeing the contradictory evidence.

  Even members of this cabal of Experiencers might find their memories of the more exotic parts of the event sort of bleeding out of recollection, until one day, all they remembered is that they took shelter from a severe storm, maybe a tornado, which killed a close-by delivery man. Nancy or Tom would probably remember it all, but Susan or Gilbert could very well not remember any of the weird stuff by this time next year.

  Tom had noticed in his travels that only about five percent or so of people really saw what was happening in these events, and they usually kept the people they were with seeing some of the truth while they were with them. As soon as they separated, the others would begin to forget and rationalize it all away. If Susan was by herself right now, she would have already forgotten the true nature of the storm.

  Somewhere between ten and twenty-five percent of the others who witnessed this sort of event knew something strange was going on, but couldn’t tell for sure what it was. For the five percent who saw it all, they seemed to pay a price for the gift, or was it a curse?

  Tom almost remembered some past time when these things did not happen, but he can recall no details of that idyllic life. He thought that he might have once had a family, but he couldn’t remember who they were, whether they were wife, or kids, or parents. He could not remember names, or places, or even the faces of these possible family members.

  One of the weirder things that Tom had noticed was that while the general population could apparently not see these events, there were venues galore, such as that late night ‘coast-to-coast’ radio show where many of these events were discussed in nauseating detail. People apparently had no problem accepting the events as being the paranoid delusions of some hypothetical lunatic fringe, even though the persons testifying that they witnessed such events ranged from the Mad Hatter’s crazy cousin to Mr. So-Sane-I’m-Boring.

  Tom sidled over to the television, which was languishing unloved in the corner, and turned it on. He used the remote he found nearby to surf for either news or entertainment, whichever he found first. It was news.

  A perky young reporter was acting as an anchor, and was in the midst of a report about the 7.2 magnitude earthquake that had just occurred in the middle of Mexico and had nearly leveled the nearby city of Nayarit. She was remarking on the random nature of earthquakes, and how nobody really understood what triggers them. Meanwhile, the video rolling in the background was showing the reputed epicenter of the earthquake, which was experiencing continuous aftershocks, probably due to the large tentacle-like structures that were waving about in the air, and occasionally destroying nearby buildings. It was quite obvious to Tom that those limbs, which Tom supposed to be attached to an even larger subterranean creature, were the cause of the earthquake. It was equally obvious that neither the reporter, nor any of the nearby spectators saw those limbs.

  In the next half hour, Tom watched as the news reported on a town cleared of humans by Zombies, a cult that committed suicide after what appeared to be a mass demonic possession if one went by the inscriptions left behind, and a battle between two factions of the Muslim populations in Syria which was wholly caused by human agencies. At no point did the newscasters show any indication of reporting on anything unusual.

  As Tom turned the television off, and started thinking seriously about getting some shut-eye, Bailey started barking hysterically and staring toward the ceiling. Tom spun around on his heel, trying to get a panoramic read on the surroundings.

  “What the hell is the matter with your dog?” Gilbert asked, after opening his eyes from where he was resting them on the couch.

  Tom was surprised that Gilbert was not unconscious, let alone aware of the dog’s activities. “I don’t have a clue, but he knows what is going on better than that reporter did, so I am prone to pay attention to his reporting skills.”

  “Fuck that. I’m catching some Zs.” Gilbert lurched up and made his unsteady way through the door to the bedroom. Tom heard the door slam and lock.

  “What is it, Bailey?” Tom asked the dog. “What’s twisting your tail?”

  Bailey looked at Tom with a complex mixture of fear, confusion and patience on his canine face. Tom was pretty sure that if he was in front of a mirror, he would see just such an expression on his own face.

  “Hey, it is getting real bright outside.” Nancy said. She had been looking out of the window, and Tom had to agree that it was far brighter out there than the full moon that was out tonight could account for. A pure white light had chased all the shadows away, a light so bright that the shape of the nearby tree was blurring, and beyond all that could be seen was a glare.

  “Tom, this is scaring me!” She whimpered.

  Even Susan had started looking around in a drunken state of alarm. Bailey took this moment to resume his barking, low and serious. He also chose to make a strategic retreat to a location just behind Tom’s legs. Once in position, he ceased the loud barking, and began a low-throated and continuous growling.

  Tom decided to take a look out of the window himself, and abandoned the brave canine to take up protective cover under one of the chairs by the table. Opening the window, he actually stuck his head out of the window, and looked up.

  As bright as it was, he could just make out a huge triangular craft floating silently above the house. The light seemed to be emanating from the edges of the craft. Tom feels Nancy nestled against his back, as she peers upward toward the craft. He feels her fingernails dig into his shoulder.

  Tom looks back at her face, which is filled with terror and panic. “Help me. It’s pulling me!” She moans. Her eyes return to watching the craft floating close and overhead. It was obviously a compulsion that she could not resist. She stepped around Tom, so that she was now between him and the window. The light seemed to be concentrating around her, and her eyes were locked on the sky until Tom forced her head around to look at him.

  “It is taking me, Tom!” She wailed.

  Tom let go of her head and reached for her shoulders, so that he could pull her away from the window. As he made contact, his fingers went through her shoulder, meeting only a small bit of the resistance that they should have met. When he looked at her, he could see that she was slowly fading from view, becoming more transparent by the second. She was saying something to him, but it seemed to be a long way away. In a few seconds, she was gone.

  Tom lost track of things for a few seconds after that, and only really came to himself when Susan raked him with her fingernails as she screeched and tried to climb out of the window after Nancy. Nothing she did for the next five minutes made the least bit of sense, so he said nothing and just held her tightly.

  An hour later saw him, coaxing an additional couple of whiskies into her system as proxies for tranquilizers. He had also found some steaks in the freezer, and had thawed one and fed Bailey. Susan now made a bit more sense than before, and they had been quietly talking about what they should do next for the last few minutes. Susan was insistent that they should go to h
er house, which was just about a mile down the road, while never once referencing Nancy, or the fact that Nancy would not be coming.

  A couple hours later the dawn light was just beginning to stream, and they decided that now was as good a time as any. Gilbert was sawing logs, and could not be awakened by Tom or by Susan from the wrong side of a locked door, so they decided that they would go without him. In a few moments, Susan, Tom and Bailey were off.

  For the first thousand feet or so, they just strolled down the sidewalk, past the destroyed delivery truck, and along an interval of stone walling hiding some of the more expensive homes from view. After that, Susan insisted that the best short cut led through some sort of scrubby shrub-like plants with the random sticker on its branches. Soon, Tom had a series of long, shallow scratches on his arms and a feeling that Susan didn’t have a clue how to get to her house.

  Finally, Susan actually looked like she recognized the area, which comforted Tom no end, and started to lead the party more confidently. This interlude lasted all of two minutes, until two things happened at once. Bailey’s ears came up, and the hackles on his back rose, and a slow and continuous growl came from him. In instant response, a low pitched growling sound seemed to come out of the bushes from all directions at once.

  Susan began to run in what Tom hoped was the right direction, but having no better plan, he and Bailey ran along behind her. In a few minutes, they were standing in an unkempt yard trying to catch their breath. Susan fumbled her keys out of her pocket and finally got the door to the house open. Luckily, Susan had transferred her keys to her pocket from her purse at the beginning of this trip. Luckily, because she had abandoned her purse in terror in the bushes when the growling had begun.