Did you hear that?
Did the world just end?
I think it's starting.
Little Apocalypse is now online. Just in time, sugars.
The first incarnation includes stuff from Cassie Smyth, Paul Carrington, Tim Wiley, and Brandon French. ARAJAY is fleeing his own little apocalypse in the form of hurricane Gustav, so his contributions are understandably delayed. But we hope to have some of his material available with the September 7th or 14th updates.
We hope you enjoy the apocalypse.
Just to give you an idea of where we're going, here's the introduction to our comic book. This will surely change quite a bit as it moves from short story to script to artwork. But at its core, it's the same stories and characters you've already met. This piece draws primarily on Sophie and The Attic. We're just tying them all together into something larger. Hope you like it!
Sophie slept. Her ice-blonde hair covered her closed eyes in chunky shards. Less than a mile away, Wyatt was making his escape.
"That's my girl, Emma," he cooed to the girl, barely over 20, who was pulling a chair into the center of her hospital room's floor. "See the door?"
She winced. She hated his voice. Though to her, it sounded much like her own voice rattling around in her head. And in any place but a place like this, no one else would have been able to hear him.
At The Briar, Wyatt had lots of potential friends. The crazy and the gifted both ended up here, and they were the only ones who listened to... people like Wyatt. Yes, people is close enough.
Emma was too short to reach the ceiling even from the chair, much less pull herself up into it. "Rabbit?" Her voice was shaky, her eyes dilated, her hands bloody again. "Rabbit? I can't get the door open."
Wyatt wished there were a broom, or a ladder, or something useful in the sparse room. "Try the other chair. Lift it over your head and pull the door down with it." Emma got the second chair, climbed up again, and held it over her head with the legs in the air. Eventually she managed to knock one of the ceiling tiles away, leaving a black hole in the center of the ceiling.
"No ladder," she muttered.
"Stack the chairs."
"I'll fall!"
"You only have to get into the attic. Who cares if the chairs fall after you've got your grip?"
In all honesty, Wyatt didn't care that much if the chairs fell before she'd got her grip. A little, because Emma was gifted and crazy, and could be valuable. Still, ultimately replaceable.
But she managed. As the two of them climbed into the ceiling, the chairs fell over on the white tiles with a loud thud.
Sophie was shifting in her sleep.
In the dream, she was four again. Just old enough to remember. A phone was ringing in the kitchen. She peeked out of her old bedroom, began an endless march down the hall of her childhood home. The darkly-stained wood floor shifted, twisted and grew longer and longer. The ringing in the distance stopped, cut off by her mother's voice.
"Hello? ... Gillian, hello! ... I was just finishing up in the kitchen. We should be at the service in less than an hour..."
The voice anchored Sophie's perspective, and walking became much easier. She made it to the end of the hallway.
Emma and Wyatt were making their way down their own dark hall, on hands and knees through itchy, ancient insulation. Emma was beginning to whimper, frightened of whatever she saw in the dark.
"Don't worry, girl," said Wyatt, trying (and failing) to be comforting. "We're getting out of here. There should be an elevator shaft. Just feel along for it."
The ceiling groaned underneath them, and a tile fell out from under Emma, crashing onto the floor of a concrete room below. Hopefully no one was around to hear it.
"Kitchen," said Emma.
Wyatt didn't argue with her.
Sophie turned to see her mother standing over their old iron stove, an anachronism she insisted on including in an otherwise modern 1970's kitchen. "Momma?"
"Sophie, honey, what's wrong?" asked her mother, holding a hand over the phone's receiver.
"I'm having a bad dream," she said, thinking, That's not quite right, is it? And she ran toward her mother's arms.
Emma and Wyatt were almost at the elevator shaft, near the corner of the top floor of the building, when the ceiling started to give way.
Sophie tripped over the telephone chord. She put out her hands to brace her fall.
Emma tried to hang on to the thin metal beams between the empty spaces of the ceiling, but those gave way, too.
Sophie fell onto the hot stove and screamed, trying to pull her hand away.
Emma hit the floor with a sick, soft noise.
Sophie's mother dropped the telephone, running to her and grabbing her arms, pulling as hard as she could.
Wyatt watched as blood began to pool around Emma's head.
Sophie passed out as the flesh of her right hand tore, leaving tendons and smoking skin on the iron.
"Dammit," said Wyatt. "Dammit."
They're so fragile.
Sophie woke up. She didn't wake up screaming anymore, just sweating. She wiped the sweat from her forehead with her right hand. That hand had a hole in the center of the palm. You could see right through it.
NEW!
The rumors claimed her mother was a witch. That Sophie had burned her hand not while her mother made cornbread on an iron stove, but while she stirred evil spells in a cauldron. The effect was the same. Children were warned by their parents, or found her silk gloves strange, or were terrified when they saw what the gloves concealed.
Sophie herself couldn't remember exactly how it had happened. She was two, and she remembered the black iron, panic, not being able to get away. She remembered the pain, but that was it. According to the story she'd always believed, she'd rested her hand against an iron stove, and stuck. She passed out when they pulled her off. She'd healed, and could even use it normally. But for the rest of her life, she would have a perfect, round hole through the palm of her right hand. So when the bandages came off, the silk gloves went on.
But the older she got, the more she wondered. She saw more cauldrons in her dreams. She questioned more memories. But what really took some getting used to were the things she'd started seeing when she took her gloves off.
Alone, at night, she would hold up her hand in a greeting to no one in particular, and stare through that hole at the opposite wall. Sophie wondered how different things might be if she looked normal. If her mother weren't gone, if she weren't alone in the world. And eventually she'd console herself; remind herself how much worse it could be. But she'd still put the gloves back on before going to bed.
One night last December, though, she found she wasn't looking at the opposite wall. That she was, in fact, holding her hand up in greeting to someone. A man's face peered back at her through her palm.
She screamed, jumped out of her chair, and found... that she was still alone. That she was losing it. Just seeing things.
She gave up dwelling on her disfigurement for a few weeks afterward. Obviously, it wasn't doing her health much good. But old habits, especially the private self-destructions, die hard. And during a winter storm, drinking expensive wine from the bottle, she took off the glove and held up her hand.
The same face peered through, cocking an eyebrow. Sophie put down her hand. No one there. She lifted it again, and in a bravery that can only be explained by believing she was dreaming, said...
"Hello."
"I thought you could see me!"
"Yes, well, I'm still not sure if you're there or not."
"Me either, really. But it's nice to have someone to talk to."
And that was all they did. Talked about the war, Dostoevsky, their jobs. His name was Hobbes. He talked about becoming invisible - he wasn't sure if he was dead, he just knew that one day, he woke up and no one could see him. Sophie told him about her accident, and apologized for ignoring him for three weeks. And that she couldn't think of any way to help. It seemed silly to "make contact" and have no idea where to go from there. It wasn't like the movies at all.
"If I could come talk with you again, that would be a service in itself, ma'am." He tipped his hat, and she followed him with her hand as he opened and walked out the front door.
And that night, Sophie went to bed without her gloves on, feeling a little less alone in the world, and slept well. She may have had strange trials ahead of her, but during that first experience, she'd finally found a friend to help her through.
