PULPWORK PRESS

 An unnatural storm arises with great fury and breaks the spine of a foreign warship upon the reefs of Bathos, casting the few survivors into the merciless machinery of the City of Corruption; A silver mine haunted by the vengeful dead; An Assassins Guild that will stop at nothing to slay one that was formerly their own--the woman known as the 'siren of slaughter'; a perilous journey through the bowels of a mountain where lurk the half-breed children of man and demon. Welcome to the City of Bathos!

Through the Groaning Earth picks up where the groundbreaking cult novel of paranoid fantasy, Tales from the City of Bathos left off, introducing us to new characters, visiting old acquaintances (would you ever want to call any of these characters friends?) and bitter enemies, and leaving us stranded in the streets of Bathos, The City of Corruption--which is really the central character of the novel.

With a Tarantino-esque story structure, Leiber-like characterizations, Lovecraftian elements, Howardian-style verbage and a grim dollop of the Orwellian dystopia that has overtones of modern Socialist government, Through the Groaning Earth is a thought-provoking as well as an entertaining read...don't believe us? 

Just take a look at the first chapter! 

 Part One:

The Feast of Yog Reejath

When Graw Dunheel awoke his head pounded something fierce and a sense of vertigo assailed him, as if he were standing on the deck of a swaying ship after a long night of ale drinking in the rowdy and reeking taverns of Wharftown, which lay alongside the Tiber River. He couldn’t recall spending any time in Wharftown recently and he certainly couldn’t recall any drinking—so with the greatest of deliberation he forced his eyes open and found himself trussed about the waist with a rope as thick as his thumb, dangling in mid-air, being slowly lowered into the darkest of abysses.

Graw’s foggy mind jerked awake and he threw up one burly arm from where it had dangled at his side and grabbed hold of a thick iron hook which lowered his rope-entangled body into the noxious miasma of darkness beneath. He was still blinking away the dimness at the corners of his vision, whether it was the lingering effects of sleep or the surrounding darkness he could not tell, and he noticed a pin-prick of wavering torchlight above his head.

As his hazy vision came into focus he saw a leering, shriveled face next to the guttering torch. Tangled locks as black as coal fell in twisted profusion from beneath a scarlet cap that was braided with golden strands of the Rafusian silkworm that fed on the gold rich soil in those far flung valleys.

“So the feast awakes,” cackled the man. “Count yourself blessed, you are about to become one with the gods!”

Graw tried to speak, but only a dry croak came from his throat. Then he found his voice, a booming growl as deep as the Mines of Ashturath. “Let me out of this pit or I’ll crawl up this line and strangle your scrawny neck!”

The shriveled man laughed as though this were the richest of jests. “Thavil, a Priest of Yog Reejath, does not tremble before the idle boasts of gutter brawlers. Do not fear! Embrace your fate. You have the honor of providing nourishment to Yog Reejath before he bursts forth three days hence from the earth— to devour the virgin goddess and radiate her power to his followers—”

The priest broke off suddenly as he realized that his sacrifice had not idly sat by while he was lowered to his doom. Graw put a booted foot into the hook and fairly leaped up the rope, pulling himself upward, hand-over-hand. Though well over fifty years of age, Graw’s muscles had been formed by years of gutter brawling in his reckless youth and hardened by many more years of ferrying prisoners to the Drowning Man Prison in the center of the Tiber River along Bathos’s shore. Though his muscles cracked and protested, he hauled himself up the swaying line at an amazing speed that momentarily shocked the priest into inaction.

Finally Thavil realized that in a few more moments Graw would be clambering over the stone sides of the well, and he slipped a curved sacrificial dagger from the folds of his cloak and slashed its sharp point across the hempen rope. He slashed all but a few fibers of the rope and the last strands began to part with audible twangs—the weight of the brawny Graw Dunheel too much to bear.

The last strand parted as Graw neared the mouth of the well, and he grabbed futilely before plunging back into the darkness below. He dropped thirty feet through the noxious miasma and his heels struck first, something rolling beneath his feet and causing him to pitch backward on his posterior, something brittle collapsing beneath him and absorbing the brunt of his fall.

For a moment he lay on his back, gasping for the air that was knocked from his lungs. He saw Thavil’s shriveled face twist in the semblance of a smile, and then the torch disappeared—the priest’s voice lingering after, hollow and dry as it echoed down the well. “Come you, servitors of Yog Reejath, we have much to do in preparation of the Twelfth Day.”

Then Graw found himself alone in the silence and in the inky black. Or at least he thought he was alone; strange sibilant noise filtered through the darkness like grain through a sieve. Recovering his breath, Graw rolled over onto his side, things rattling and clacking beneath him. He began to cast about with his hands, feeling the environment around him and picturing it in his mind: broken and split bones and human skulls he was sure. But they were all very brittle, as if all the strength had been leeched out of them. They crunched and shattered beneath him as he groped in front of himself in the dripping blackness.

While despair would have seized many men, Graw mused on the irony that had brought him to such a grim fate. In an act of mercy he had chained one of the Emperor’s prisoners in manacles that he knew were rusted and weak, so the prisoner might have a chance of escape before the tides filled the basement of Drowning Man Prison and killed him. Unfortunately, this prisoner—nothing more than an apprentice academic—had been personally condemned by word from the Emperor. Somehow the Emperor had discovered the apprentice’s escape and, to express his displeasure, had sent a squad of imperial assassins to eliminate everyone who had failed him—starting with the judge and his entire family, and then Graw’s fellow prison guard, Brewbeck. When Graw discovered the slaughter he surmised that he was on the Emperor’s list for extermination and fled to the Old City with the squad of imperial assassins hot on his heels. The irony of the situation was that an upstart cult ambushed and snatched him from the street to feed their ‘god’ well before the vaunted imperial assassins could ever lay a finger on him.

For long minutes he sorted through the bone pile, gradually searching a wider area until finally his fingers closed upon the iron hook, which had dropped to the bottom of the well when the priest, Thavil, had cut the line. Graw hefted the hook and found that it was a sturdy casting and estimated it weighed well over half a stone. Still attached through a loophole was about twenty feet of heavy rope. Graw gathered this up in a coil which he knotted and looped around his shoulder.

Graw found a thighbone and wrapped his shirt around one end. He patiently began to pluck threads from one sleeve until had a small pile in front of him. He pulled a small stone over to him and began to strike it with the iron hook, creating small cascades of sparks, which for the briefest fraction of a moment sent faint rays of illumination reflecting off the piles of bones around him. How many people had been fed to this Yog Reejath and for how long, Graw could hardly imagine.

Finally a spark strayed into the pile of thread and Graw blew on the ember, nurturing the spark into a flame. He quickly thrust his makeshift torch into the flame and caught his shirt on fire. He thrust the flaming thigh bone into the air and the growing flame cast light into the far corners of the cavern in which he was prisoner. The chamber was rough-hewn from living stone, about thirty feet in diameter. The shaft down which he had been dropped was twenty feet over his head and in the exact center of the chamber. There was no way he could climb to the shaft, and he didn’t have enough rope to attempt casting the hook to the well mouth.

Having eliminated the shaft of the well as a means of escape, he cast his eyes along the brittle mounds of bones that covered the floor of the entire chamber. This was obviously the meal room for something, but oddly enough there were no teeth marks on the bones. They didn’t appear to have been gnawed, and they were all strangely brittle. All flesh and sinew seemed to have been entirely devoured, but many scraps of clothing remained strewn about the room. Before his torch could burn low, he thrust it into the earth at his feet and began to build many more torches from bone and cloth.

There was one tunnel that left the room, measuring about seven feet in height and four feet across. Graw didn’t know if this tunnel led directly into the lair of Yog Reejath or if perhaps there were other tunnels he might explore in the hopes of finding a way out of this hell hole. However, it was clear to him that if he stayed where he was he could soon expect Yog Reejath to get hungry and come looking for his meal. If Graw had to meet Yog Reejath, he preferred to do it on his own terms—instead of waiting helplessly for his doom. Still, given a choice, he would prefer to meet not at all the beast that had devoured hundreds of humans in this very room.

Graw found a decaying burlap sack that still held enough strength to perform adequately and he filled it with his macabre torches. He lit a new torch and with hook and rope over one shoulder, the sack of torches over the other, and a flaming torch in his hand, he took a deep breath of the foul air and plunged into the tunnel.

Graw followed this tunnel for what seemed like close to an hour. The walls were hewn from stone and sometimes from dirt, with beams and pillars driven into place. The floor was covered with a dried silvery slime, and when Graw’s torch flame died to a flickering ember he realized that it was phosphorescent and gave off its own dim light. It was enough light so that he could navigate the corridor without a torch, but still he lit another—its bright flame carrying into far corners that the luminescent slime did not. Graw felt more comfortable tramping around in these foul tunnels when he could see better.

Graw’s decision to use another torch was validated when the flame revealed a branching tunnel deep in a niche that the luminescence of the slime would not have exposed. This tunnel had a narrow mouth and he had to duck to enter, but he followed this new path, nonetheless, anxious to leave the tunnel which had obviously been a major thoroughfare for whatever misbegotten creature that the cult of Yog Reejath worshiped.

In this new tunnel he encountered many branches and he carefully marked each arching entry by scratching an X with a sharp stone. It was difficult for him to keep track of time without the reference of the stars or the sun overhead, and to his addled senses sometimes it seemed as though he had been tramping through the dark abysses for hours and sometimes days.

Sometimes he wished for someone to talk to as he wandered in circuitous routes, vainly searching for a way to escape. Even the taciturn Brewbeck would have been a welcome companion—his monosyllabic grunts and sarcastic jabs would have provided some relief to this interminable silence. Still, Graw had never been very social, so solitude was nothing new to him. He’d been too awkward to initiate a courtship of the few woman who’d shown some interest in him. In the old days he’d spoken most eloquently with his fists and won quite a few tussles in the back alleys of Bartertown—making a good living on his cut of the prize money skimmed off the wagers. The female admirers he’d made in those days were scags, courtesans, and street rabble—not the type of women that he could have brought home to mother, so he turned aside their persistent attentions with brusque demeanor and insults.

The gnawing pit in his stomach turned his attention to his hunger and he checked for the pouch at his belt which he had filled with raisins, nuts and mutton jerky he’d purchased from a street vendor. He was thankful to see that it was all still there. Though Thavil and his thugs had removed the foot long knife blade, they hadn’t bothered to take his food.

He crouched against the wall and filled his belly. He felt fatigue taking over his body. He didn’t know how long he had been wandering the labyrinth, but exhaustion sapped his mental and physical acuity and he drifted off to sleep, his fingers wrapped around the haft of the heavy iron hook.

Graw had no idea how long he slept, but it was sibilant movement in the darkness that snapped him out of his deep slumber. The sound came again, softly, but penetrating as if it were resonating in the marrow of his bones. His entire body broke out in a chill sweat and a low moan came to his ears, followed by a myriad of whispers that bombarded him: a thousand voices in his head that whispered strange, demented things—things that threatened to tear the fabric of his mind asunder if they did not cease.

With the greatest of efforts Graw staggered to his feet, his trembling legs barely sustaining the weight of his body. Wild-eyed he cast about in the darkness, the faint luminescent glow of the dried slime showing only the packed dirt walls and the rotting support timbers that supported creosote-soaked overhead braces.

He went to his knee and fumbled in his bag, pulling loose a torch made from the bones of a human arm wrapped with rags. He laid his torch next to a stone and struck the stone with the heavy hook in his right hand. A spark leaped from the stone and smoldered in the rags. With frantic breaths Graw blew the spark into a conflagration and raised the flaming brand over his head with trembling left arm.

Never had such fear and panic taken hold of him, and he wondered at the evil forces and thoughts that threatened the very foundations of his sanity. There! The leaping flames showed some movement far down the corridor; black as pitch, rolling and viscous, the darkest of nightmares become reality. A thousand voices stabbed through his mind, beckoning thoughts of an unhinged mind, of impossibilities, and probabilities, of things beyond the great abysses of frozen space and time, of great horrors that slumbered there, waiting to be beckoned forth by those deluded enough to plumb the depths of evil’s depravity.

The whispering cacophony of voices whispered tales of corrupt seedlings plummeting through the voids of space imbedded in the heart of a stone, until they tore through the envelope that surrounded a nascent planet—the fires of its entry awakening the dormant seeds. Still they languished, trapped in stone until they could plant seductions in the minds of men, bringing them thither to seek out the imprisoned seedlings still caught in their jail of stone. Then summoned with horrific rites and bathed in the blood of innocents, they burst forth to feed and grow, devouring the feasts and being nourished until they could dominate the manlings that infested the planet.

Graw roared in defiance, attempting to drive out the dark thoughts. Then as the beast rolled into sight, something in his mind snapped and he swayed in his boots—jaw hanging open and eyes wide with horror. The gelatinous thing bubbled into full view of his torchlight, a hundred dark tentacles flailing forward—probing and reaching. Twelve fetid maws mewled and cried with hunger, and over each was an empty socket where its eyes were missing.

 TO BE CONTINUED IN THROUGH THE GROANING EARTH

OUT JULY 2010! 

 When Olympic fencer Max Damage inherits the family business, Damage Inc, he finds messy bookkeeping and a number of mysterious projects, and when a long-legged Russian woman breaks into the offices late one night he finds himself the target of the president of Murmykia--the self styled chess-master and ruler of a splintered Russian state.

As the pile of dead bodies and the mysteries grow deeper, Max fights to unravel the tangled skein of his own shadowed past until he comes face to face with his own twisted alter ego...sounds good right? Can't wait to read it?

Well, check out the first chapter!

 1.

 Max Damage fell back into a defensive stance as Pietro Vespucci launched a storm of flashing steel in his direction. Both men were dressed in the traditional white garb of the sporting duelist, their meshed visors locked into the down position and concealing the expressions of the men who fought—advancing and retreating up the thin strip of matting that had been designated their battleground.

No crowds watched and no judges officiated in the bare brick interior of the training dojo. Only the duelists’ respective trainers, Jacque Leveque and Stang Ortellia, watched the match, both edging forward on their benches, watching each movement as though their lives depended upon the outcome.

Though the faces of the combatants were not visible beneath their protective helmets, their difference in physiques were marked. Max Damage stood a six-foot-two wedge of muscle, moving lightly on powerful legs, the dark ponytail that protruded from the rear of his helm whipping to and fro at the sudden movements of his body. Pietro Vespucci was limber and wiry, standing several inches taller than his opponent and with a considerably greater reach due to his unnaturally long arms.

With the Olympic trials coming up in only four months time, their trainers had been driving them hard to achieve their top form, and this private bout was a preview of the competition that was to come.

Max Damage parried Pietro’s frenzied attack with such facility and sureness that it made Italy’s top fencer look as though he were a novice. Already frustrated by his inability to get through Max’s guard, Pietro’s lips tightened behind the steel mesh of his mask, sweat dripping down his face as he dug deep into his repertoire of tricks, trying one after the other, and finding that his opponent easily anticipated them all.

Sweat streamed down the Italian’s face, his breath coming heavier, and his rage mounting as each of his gambits failed. Finally he lunged forward in a desperate attempt to strike his American opponent with the balled tip of his rapier, but Max deftly parried and twisted, sending the Italian fencer’s blade cart-wheeling across the stone floor of the practice room.

Instead of going in for the touch, Max backed off a few paces. “Would you care to retrieve your blade?”

Pietro cursed beneath his breath and lifted the mesh of his face shield. While his gray-haired trainer, Stang Ortellia, leaped spryly across the room to recover the lost sword, Pietro lifted a towel from the wooden bench and mopped his perspiring, livid features.

Stang shook his head as he brought the sword to his failing student and turned toward the other bench. “The tip of the blade is bent.  Do we have your leave to replace the rapier with another?”

Jacque Leveque turned his mostly bald head toward Max as if to appraise the fighting capacity of his student. When he saw that Max stood in calm repose, he nodded to Stang. “That is acceptable.”

Stang turned to his student and quietly spoke a few words of advice. “Control your anger. You’re letting him frustrate you, and the more you become angry the worse you fight.”

“He’s making a fool out of me!” snapped Pietro.

“Use this as a learning experience,” answered Stang, the cleft in his permanently-furrowed brow deepening evening further. “This is the reason I arranged for this match, so that you might have a taste of Olympic caliber competition. You may be facing Mr. Damage in the Olympics. Best you learn his strengths now so that you can turn them against him when it matters.”

The petulant fury in Pietro’s eyes raged unabated as he turned away from his trainer, a sneer twisting his damp lips. “The gold medal will be mine,” he muttered. “Make no mistake about that.”

He flipped open a large black case and quickly studied the five rapiers that lay nestled in black velvet. All but one of them were competition swords, capped at the tip of the blade with a tiny metal ball. He snatched up the fifth blade, the one with the sharpened tip, and quickly strode back to the dueling floor.

Instead of taking position on his end of the floor and lowering his blade he advanced toward Max who was turned away, speaking with his instructor, and awaiting the signal for the match to recommence.

“En Garde!” bellowed Pietro, but before he had finished the warning, the Italian fencer whipped his blade upward and lunged.

Max turned at the belated challenge, and the sharp tip of Pietro’s blade plunged into his right arm, between the insertions of his bicep and the crook of his elbow. Grimacing, more in anger than pain, Max jerked back, pulling loose from his opponent’s blade. He brought his rapier into position and fought off the avalanche of steel that Pietro unleashed upon him. Strings of Italian curses poured from Pietro’s lips as he savagely attacked.

As Max fought a dull ache spread from the puncture in his arm. He knew from experience that his wound was more serious than his nervous system was letting him feel. By some accident of birth he had been born with a resistance to pain, but the side effect was a dulled sense of touch, and the inability to tell when he had sustained a serious injury. Probably he was doing further damage to himself by continuing to swing a sword, but Max didn’t see how he had much choice in the matter. Pietro was out for blood, and Max knew that the Italian was no longer using a competition-approved weapon.

Neither Max nor Pietro were wearing their helmets and their faces were particularly vulnerable. By now, Max was convinced that he was the better swordsman, but his own weapon wasn’t capable of inflicting much damage unless he aimed for the face. With consummate skill, Max shunted aside Pietro’s attacks and lunged, putting the ball of his blade-tip between Pietro’s eyes.

Max let the blade tip flick to his left, and the ball hit the cornea of Pietro’s right eye. Immediately, Pietro cried out, dropping his sword and falling to his knees where he clapped both hands over his eye.

“You’ve blinded me!”

Max kicked Pietro’s dropped blade away from him, and then backed off while Jacque Leveque and Stang Ortellia rushed forward. Jacque, a full head shorter than Max, and a good four decades older, pushed his pupil back to the bench where he sat him down and began removing his dueling jacket so that he might take a closer look at Max’s wounded arm.

Stang carefully laid Pietro back on the mat. “Take your hands away and let me see your eye.”

“He’s put out my eye! The incompetente put out my eye!”

“If he did it’s your own fault,” spat Stang. “You attacked him with a live blade.”

Despite his pupil’s protests, Stang pushed aside Pietro’s hands and pulled back the lids of his eye to see the bloodshot and swollen orb beneath. “It’s not life threatening,” he decided. “And you’re not going to lose your eye. Although, if he had been using a live blade you might have.”

“I can’t see out of that eye,” gulped Pietro.

“I’ll take you to an eye doctor and he’ll be able to tell you what to expect better than I,” said Stang. “But that’s going to be my last act as your trainer. Once the eye doctor is through with you, my resignation is in effect.”

Stang turned and approached the bench where Jacque worked over Max’s sitting form. “I sincerely apologize to both of you for the behavior of my student. Is the wound serious?”

Jacque examined the wound gravely. “It looks like four to six weeks of immobilization before we can begin physical therapy. If we’re fortunate, Max will be back in condition in time for the Olympic trials, but he still will have lost months of training.”

“You’re forgetting that I heal quickly,” said Max. “A month tops and I’ll be back in prime condition.”

Stang shook his head, his eyes lowered to the floor. “I humbly apologize. I’m extremely ashamed.”

Max ruefully prodded at the nearly bloodless puncture wound. Even a setback of a few weeks would be a frustrating delay for him—still, there was little he could do about it now.

“Apology accepted,” said Max with a sigh.

“I had better attend to my former student,” said Stang. “I hope that when we meet next it will be under more pleasant circumstances.”

“Me too,” agreed Max.

Jacque glanced up at Stang and nodded. “Au revoir.”

In short order, Stang helped Pietro from the building, leaving only the rugged American fencer and his bald French instructor.

“You know,” said Jacque. “Messiur Ortellia was sincere in his apology. I trained by his side at two of the finest European academies and he is an honorable man.”

Max nodded, apparently accepting this at face value. “It’s his choice of students that leaves something to be desired.”

Jacque finished applying antiseptic and dressing the wound before rigging a makeshift sling to keep Max’s right arm immobilized. “Pietro Vespucci is what I call a contrecarrer duelist. He wins in Europe because he has fought many of their best fencers over and over. He has learned how they fight, and has become adept at making counterpoint maneuvers based on his knowledge of each one’s fighting tactics. But if he is not familiar with the tactics that his opponent uses, he is hopelessly out of his depth.”

“So why agree to this match?” asked Max. “It seems that he has more to gain from our encounter today. Wouldn’t it have been better for me to meet him for the first time in the Olympics, when he would have no idea of the tactics that I use?”

“Perhaps,” said Jacque. “But I didn’t know that Pietro was a contrecarrer until I had the opportunity to see him in action today. As the duel went on he adapted to your style of fighting and improved somewhat. You have the advantage, though, in that you innovate according to your circumstances. That thrust at the eyes that put Pietro down was certainly not something that I ever taught you. In competition that’s a useless move. You’re going for the touch, and the location of the touch doesn’t much matter. But today that move might very well have saved your life. Pietro would have skewered you like a piece of meat on a shiskabob if you hadn’t been the better fencer.”

Max’s full lips curled up with amusement. “I like your graphic description of my death. Perhaps you’d like to describe some other possible ways in which I might have died?”

In spite of himself, a smile crept onto Jacque’s face. He was about to reply when the buzzing of a pager interrupted his retort.

“Could you reach into my gym bag and grab that for me?” asked Max.

Jacque thrust a remarkably large hand—especially for someone of such a wiry build and unremarkable stature—into Max’s bag and retrieved a pager, which he handed to his pupil.

Max studied the phone number on the pager screen, and shook his head. “I have no idea who’s trying to call me. This isn’t a number that I recognize.”

“Maybe it’s your father,” said Jacque as closed up the sword case. “How long has it been since you’ve heard from him?”

“About five months,” said Max. “He showed up at my apartment one night and gave me a .45 caliber Derringer, made me promise to keep it with me at all times, and then disappeared. I looked out my window and saw him get into a Humvee that a blond woman was driving, and that was the last I’ve seen of him.”

“Your father always did strike me as a rather peculiar man,” said Jacque. “But I get a prompt monthly check in the mail for my services every month, so how can I slight him for a few eccentricities?”

“I could make a long list of eccentricities, but it isn’t them that bother me so much. I don’t suppose it matters now that I’m an adult, but he was pretty much an absentee dad for my entire childhood. Sure, he enrolled me in some of the best and strangest schools and courses, but I was essentially raised by committee.”

“My father died when I was seven,” sympathized Jacque. “It was quite an adjustment going from a full time father to none at all. At the very least, your father is still among the living.”

Max shrugged. “Who knows? He could very well be dead, considering the way he showed up in the middle of the night and gave me a gun for protection. He seemed worried and nervous.”

Dark strands of Max’s shoulder length hair had come loose from his ponytail during combat and fallen across his handsome, craggy face. While Jacque wasn’t looking he lifted his right arm to retie his hair with an elastic band. Now he stood and crossed to a phone at the edge of the room. He picked up the receiver and, referring to his pager, turned the dial of the phone that was obviously ten or twenty years old. The number went through and a deep but somehow irreverent voice answered.

“Stoddard and Hammond Accounting. This is Seth Armstrong.”

Max bit the inside of his cheek. “Maybe I have the wrong number,” he said. “This is Max Damage. I got a message on my pager that said to call this number.”

“Yes! I did call you,” answered Mr. Armstrong. “Is your last name pronounced Damage or Dommage? Because I’m trying to get ahold of the son of Pierre Dommage.”

“I’m his son,” answered Max. “Damage is just the Anglicized version of the name. It was always easier for Americans to say.”

“Good,” said Mr. Armstrong. “Then I’m talking with the right person. I’ve been appointed by Stoddard and Hammond to step in and help you clear up the financial end of your father’s estate so we can catalogue the assets and debits of Dommage Incorporee’ and get a clear picture of your inheritance.”

“My father’s estate?” asked Max slowly. “But my father isn’t dead.”

There was a long pause on the far end of the line. “I’m sorry, Mr. Damage. I thought you knew. We’ve had a copy of your father’s death certificate sitting in our offices for over a month, and only now did they get around to assigning anybody to the project.”

Max’s jaw dropped and he responded only with some difficulty. “How did he die?”

“Apparently his yacht got caught in Hurricane Ursula while he was in the South China Sea. They found scraps of the yacht washed up in Indonesia, and he was declared dead after the air search turned up nothing but debris.”

  TO BE CONTINUED IN THE SEA-WITCH

OUT SEPTEMBER 2010! 

JOEL JENKINS

Joel Jenkins lives with his wife and children in the misty, heron-haunted reaches of the Great Northwest, shadowed in the perpetual gloom of the Rainier Mountains. This former rock vocalist for Static Condition, and Red Die #5 enjoys weightlifting, weapons collecting, and concocting a good tale. Visit his site here.