Some of the characters in “The Women of Whale Rock” appear in the novel FantasyLife. Almost all of the characters from the story appear in Shadows and Selkies, the collection of FantasyLife stories. These stories and the novel, set in Seavy County on the imaginary part of the Oregon Coast, are dark fantasy, filled with all kinds of magical creatures and strange Gothic happenings.

These are, perhaps, the purest stories of the dark and stormy Oregon Coast—and you can get them all in the Seavy County Kickstarter that runs until Monday night. For $18, you will get three novels, including FantasyLife. Then you can choose the 4 collections reward to get the remaining FantasyLife stories. You’ll also get the stories and workshops from the stretch goals that we’ve hit.

Here’s what the critics said about the novel, FantasyLife:

“A family tragedy brings Lyssa Buckingham back to Seavy County, Oregon, a place of mysteries and mysterious goings-on that will remind the reader of Twin Peaks by way of The X-Files.  So begins the powerhouse family saga/supernatural thriller, Fantasy Life, by the acclaimed writer Kristine Kathryn Rusch.” —Wigglefish.com

“Welcome to a world brimming with mermaids, sirens, selkies and all the fantastical creatures one can imagine.  Fantasy Life by Kristine Kathryn Rusch is not only a richly woven fantasy novel, but also the story of one woman coming to terms with her own destiny.” —Romance Review Today

“Rusch does her usual artful job with this, mixing light contemporary fantasy with suspense and even a tinge of horror.” —Science Fiction Chronicle

Check out the Kickstarter here.

“The Women of Whale Rock” is part of the FantasyLife series set in Seavy County. That dark fantasy series includes a novel and several short stories (so far). If you like the story, you might like the novel, FantasyLife, and the collection Shadows and Selkies, both available right now in the Seavy County Kickstarter. The Kickstarter has hit several stretch goals, so you’ll also get other short stories and some writing workshops if you back it at $18 or more. Check out the Kickstarter here. 

The Women of Whale Rock

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

The gulls swarmed over the Sandcastle hotel.  Whipping and diving and cawing to their fellows, they looked like something out of Daphne Du Murier’s “The Birds,” a novelette more sinister and terrifying than anything Hitchcock ever produced.

Charles watched from his deck.  The morning breeze was harsh and smelled of salt.  He still wore his silk pajamas.  Rain the night before had left the wood damp and cold.  His ancient tattered slippers, the ones Grace had given him before she died, were getting wet.

Grace and gulls.  He closed his eyes, knowing what the night would bring.  Then he shook off the thought, hoping, this time, he would have the resolve to let it end.

Charles opened his eyes and rested his hands on the damp rail.  The swarming had grown worse.  Nearly a hundred birds flocked to that tiny section of beach.

There was no way he would go down there.

At least, not alone.

He sighed, went inside, and called Dan Retsler.

***

Dan Retsler was scanning the Oregonian as he stood near the window of the police department.  The window overlooked Highway 101, the main thoroughfare down the Oregon Coast.  Every morning, Retsler scanned the newspaper and the street simultaneously.  In the summer, he would be the primary witness to petty thefts, tourists running red lights, and the occasional fender-bender.

His police department had a staff of three, not counting the dispatcher.  He put two officers on at night.  During the day, he and a lone officer could handle the problems with the help of the dispatcher.  The dispatcher, one Miss Lucy Wexel had been with the department since Retsler was a teenage hoodlum at Taft High School.  He doubted she was any different when she was hired than she was now. She chewed gum, talked tough, and believed her work safe-guarded the mean streets of Whale Rock for yet another day.

The phone rang and she answered.  Then she stabbed the hold button with a stubby finger, and paused to take a draw from her cigarette before facing him.  Smoke curled around her face, making her look like someone’s kindly grandmother instead of the hardest woman he had ever known.

“Charles Bishop,” she said, and from her tone Retsler knew what the call was about.

He wound around the gun-metal desks to the small cubicle he called an office.  Then he grabbed the receiver on the ancient black phone, and punched line one.

“Gulls?” he asked.

“Got another report, huh?” Bishop sounded vaguely relieved, as if a burden were being lifted from him.

“No,” Retsler said.  “Lucky guess.”

He rubbed his nose with his thumb and forefinger, trying to ease a building headache.  He knew the drill:  first the gulls, then the body pecked beyond recognition, and finally the county coroner, who would claim death by drowning and deny everything else.

“Where should I meet you?” Bishop asked.

“At the turn-out,” Retsler said.  He’d long ago stopped demanding that Bishop stay home.  Bishop would do as he pleased.  For some reason, he always chose to join Retsler in shooing the gulls away.

And then holding watch over the ruined mass of flesh until the coroner arrived to lie to them again.

***

The first one showed up just after Bishop arrived in town.  He had called Retsler and began their tradition.  A young woman, somewhere between sixteen and twenty-six (judging by the age and condition of her remaining internal organs), washed up on the beach.  The gulls swarmed.  The tourists were terrified, and someone started a rumor that she had jumped from the Sandcastle’s roof, desolate about a love affair gone bad.

Only no one knew her, and no one was reported missing.

Definitely not a suicide, the coroner, Hamilton Denne, had said as he knelt gingerly beside the body, getting his expensive gray slacks covered with sand.  But he couldn’t rule out death by drowning.  He couldn’t confirm it either since her lungs were missing, her chest cavity ravaged, and her face gone.

He could say for certain that she had died, and that she had spent a long time in the water.

He would say nothing more.  Not even when Retsler asked about her dental records.  Her lower jaw remained intact, and some of her teeth had fillings.  Not enough to identify her, but enough to cause Bishop consternation.  He was a newly retired dentist, and he said, with a single glance, that no one used that odd mixture of iron and silver fillings anymore.  No one had since the thirties.

A week later, a second body turned up.  A boy, between ten and eighteen, dead against the sea wall.

Then the stories emerged, stories about why the Sandcastle had closed in the early seventies.  Guests reported strangers in their rooms, a strange briny smell in the hallway, and frightening attacks in the middle of the night.  Soon the hotel stood empty, even in the busy summer.  The owners tried to sell the hotel, failed, and closed the doors. Lucy heard that they had discovered another body inside the day they boarded it up, but no one had any record of it.

And so the curse of the Sandcastle began.

But locals did not discuss it, except for Retsler and Bishop.  Retsler because he had to deal with the bodies, and Bishop because of guilt.

Because of his wife.

***

Charles stood in the gravel turn-out near the beach access.  He wore his water-proof jacket, and a pair of knitted gloves, the last pair Grace had made for him.  The other gloves were in his bedroom closet, frayed reminders of her and the lack of her.  He had his back to the path, hands shoved in his pocket, the wind off the ocean wiping his remaining hair into his face.  The traffic on 101 was Saturday heavy, but so far no one had stopped to see what was drawing the gulls.

They were still diving for the body.  Their caws sounded like screams up close, a woman’s scream, desperate and alone.

He shivered in spite of himself.

At last, Retsler’s blue sedan pulled into the turn-out, spraying gravel like shot-gun pellets.  Dan Retsler was forty, but drove as if he were eighteen and immortal.  Charles often wondered how Retsler managed to pick up speeders without feeling like a hypocrite.

Retsler got out, wearing his green cop’s rain slicker and waders.  In his right hand, he clutched the bull horn.  In his left, a rifle.  He handed Charles the bull horn, then dug in the car a moment longer, emerging with a bag of popcorn big enough to feed a family of five.

“Where’s Eddie?” Charles asked.

“The Billows.  He knows what to do.”

They all did.  They had done it often enough.

Charles hefted the bullhorn, turned it on its side, made sure the speaker was off, and turned the control onto “siren.”  Retsler loaded his rifle, but kept the safety on.  The bag of popcorn leaned against his leg like a small child.

“Ready?” he asked.

Charles nodded.  They turned together, and stared at the gulls, circling and crying, white perfection against an azure sky.  The ocean smelled strongly of brine, but the wind had died.

Retsler led the way across the narrow footpath and down the concrete steps.  The previous night’s storm had churned up the beach, leaving piles of sea-blackened driftwood and gifts of garbage from the sea-bottom.  The tide was out, but the sand was still wet, attesting to the power of the storm.  Sea foam dried in a reflective green pattern across the flat part of the beach.

No one walked here except summer people.  Locals avoided this stretch of beach, making excuses about the rocks, the driftwood, the soft sand.  Sometimes Charles walked down the steps, sitting on the bottom one, and staring at the remains of Whale Rock, the one that gave the town its name.  It no longer looked like a whale as it had at the turn of the century; now it looked like a parking lot in the middle of the sea.  Even the strength of rock succumbed to the power of the ocean.

The gulls formed a sea of their own near the Sandcastle’s deteriorating wall.  The sight was formidable, not frightening, something none of the stories about birds — not even Du Murier’s classic — managed to capture.  Charles stood on a flat rock protruding from the sand and clutched the bullhorn.  Retsler stood beside him, popcorn in one hand, rifle in the other.

“Here goes nothing,” Charles said.  He picked up the bullhorn and flicked it on.  The siren wailed like amplified feedback.  He cringed, wishing he had remembered ear plugs.  Retsler hadn’t moved.  He stared intently at the gulls.

They took a few hesitant steps, then the first flew into the sky, followed by another, then another until the entire flock was airborne.  They soared, their screeches hidden by the bullhorn’s wail.

This was where Eddie came in.  He was supposed to toss bread from the Billow’s deck.  Sometimes he caught the birds’ attention; sometimes he didn’t.

This time he did.  They flew in ever widening circles north, crying their protest at the siren, and communicating the message to other gulls about food ahead.   They left this isolated section of beach torn up and covered with droppings, feathers, bits of food.

And the body, one leg bent as if the person were just resting on its back, watching the clouds.

Neither Charles nor Retsler left the rock. They had done that too early once, and he still had nightmares about it.

Of all the creatures on God’s earth, birds seemed to be the only ones without souls.

Finally the last gull disappeared behind the bluff that hid the Billows.  Charles shut off the bullhorn.  The sound stopped, but his ears ached, and would, probably, until the following day.  But if things ran true to form, he wouldn’t notice.

He shuddered, wished, just once, that this would all end.

Then Retsler inclined his head toward the body, and Charles nodded.

Together they stepped off the rock and headed down the beach.

***

Retsler clutched the bag tightly.  The rifle was heavy in his right hand.  He hoped he wouldn’t have to use either.  The last time had convinced him that the gulls weren’t afraid of the gun, and the time before that he discovered that a single bag of popcorn barely gave him time enough to escape.    The extra large bag might give them a few extra seconds, which they would need.  Bishop didn’t run well any more.  Retsler always worried about bringing him to the beach.

But if they didn’t go together, Bishop might have come alone, a risk that Retsler just couldn’t take.

The fetid odor of decaying flesh mixed with the scent of salt.  This one had been out here longer than the others.  Odd that the gulls would prey on it now.

He led the way across the rocks and onto the soft sand.  The body was shoved against the sea wall like all the others, one leg bent in a V, arms out flung above the head.  Retsler knew without looking that the eyes would be gone.  The gulls always took those first, some kind of avian delicacy, followed by the tongue if they could get it, and then they would peck their way into the stomach.  He had seen it more than once, not just here, but on bodies washed up all over the beach.

Retsler followed the three-pronged bird prints to the corpse’s side.  He set down the popcorn, reached in his pocket for the Vicks, and smeared some inside his nose.  Without looking, he handed the bottle over his shoulder to Bishop.  No one needed to smell this, not even for a moment.

Bishop took the bottle but stayed back.  Retsler crouched near the body, tried to see what it had been through the mess the gulls had made.

Male, older judging by the strands of gray mixed with the wet curls on top of the head, corpse white and bloated.  It had been in the water a long, long time.  Maybe it wasn’t one of the bodies that came to this beach.  Maybe it was a true death by drowning, not some mystery killing off-shore.

Then he saw what he hoped he wouldn’t; the remains of a vest with a gold watch still tucked inside, pants with buttons, not zippers, and on the bent leg, garters to hold up the socks.  Old man clothing pre-1950.

He glanced at Bishop who pointed at the open mouth.  Tobacco-stained teeth, cracked, crooked, and broken.  No modern dentist would allow such a travesty.

Bishop set down the bull horn.  “I’ll call the coroner,” he said.

***

That night, they got drunk.  Bishop tried to beg off, but Retsler, afraid he’d go home and brood, convinced him to brood in public.  They went to the False Colors, a local bar that had once started as a tourist attraction.  But the pirate theme seemed more foreboding than touristy, and tourists usually spent an uncomfortable hour before sliding their way out the door.  Retsler usually liked the black and white skull-and-cross-bones hanging over the door, the uneven wooden floor, the skulls lining the fireplace mantel, the sound of sea-chantries sung with unusual heartiness through the stereo speakers.

Usually.  On this night it seemed a bit much.

But Lucy had picked the place.  She was drinking whiskey and smoking a cigar, her unpainted chair tilted back against the stones in the fireplace.  Eddie was nursing his third beer, and Bishop was downing gin & tonics as if he actually liked the stuff.  Retsler had just bummed one of Lucy’s cigars when the coroner walked in.

Hamilton Denne never set foot in a bar.  He occasionally frequented establishments where fine liquor was served.  He lived in Glen Ellyn Cove, a gated community for Whale Rock’s considerable wealthy population.  The Cove had a five-star restaurant near its gate, a private club upstairs, and an atmosphere as snooty as Denne’s name.  Most of Denne’s neighbors had no idea what he did for a living.  If they asked, he always told them that he was a medical examiner.  He worked hard to keep his name out of the papers, easy to do since the coroner’s position in Seavy County was an appointed, not an elected, position.  If it was necessary to mention the coroner at all, the paper usually did it by title, not by name.  No sense in offending the Dennes of Glen Ellyn Cove.

Denne ordered a Glenlivet  and was tersely informed he would get Chivas or the bar scotch or no scotch at all.  He settled for the Chivas, and carried it to the table himself.

Retsler said nothing.  He was on his second local stout and his judgment was impaired, but not that impaired.  Eddie peered over his long-neck as if he didn’t believe what he saw.  Bishop slid his gin and tonic toward the center of the table, unfinished.  Lucy set her chair down on all four legs, leaned forward, and said, “Want a cigar, Your Highness?”

“No thanks,” Denne said, and pulled out a silver cigarette case engraved with his initials, no doubt a gift from his obscenely wealthy wife.  Being the coroner, Retsler believed, was Denne’s secret rebellion against that elegant woman whose bank account had bought Denne all the good things in life.  Denne removed a cigarette, tapped the end, then twirled it in his long, clean fingers.

He looked at all of them as if he saw what their breathalyzer results would be.  Then he put the cigarette in his mouth, lit it with a matching silver lighter, and took a long drag.  “I wasn’t here,” he said, smoke billowing out with each word.  “Not now, not ever.  You ever claim I was or breathe a word about what I’m about to say, I’ll deny it.  Is that clear?”

Lucy tilted her chair back.  Bishop stared blearily at the table.  Eddie lifted his long neck in mock toast, then cradled it against his chest.

“I’m sure no one would believe us anyway,” Retsler said.

“I’m sure you’re right.”  Denne took another drag, the gesture curiously defiant, like a teenage boy smoking in front of his parents.  “Some coroners aren’t very thorough, you know.”

Retsler knew.  He and Denne had come on at the same time and had to clean up similar messes.  They had commiserated about it more than once over lunch — in North County, away from Denne’s snobby friends.

“But for those who are, the human cadaver is a wealth of information.”

“So you going to dick with us or tell us what you found?” Eddie said.

Retsler shushed him.  He knew Denne.  Denne would talk in his own time.

“Take, for instance, someone who drowned.  Easy call, from the general condition of the body to water in the lungs.  Most coroners would leave it there.  Some would do a routine check for other fluids, and some would test the water in the lungs.”

Bishop had picked up his drink.  He clutched in one hand, knuckles white.

“If the water’s salt, possible accidental death by drowning.  But if the water’s fresh—”

“He had his lungs?” Retsler asked.

“Regrettably no,” Denne said.  “And if he had, it wouldn’t have mattered.  The fish had gotten to him before the gulls.”

“So he’d been there a long time?” Bishop asked.

Denne didn’t answer.  He took a sip of the scotch, winced, and pushed the glass aside.  “In 1936, a yacht went down near the Rock.”

“The Lady June,” Lucy said.  “Quite a scandal.”’

Retsler peered at her, doing a slow calculation in his head.  She had been six at the time.  It was hard to imagine her as a six-year-old.

“Right,” Denne said.  “You know about it?”

“They don’t,” Lucy said.

Denne nodded, resumed as if he hadn’t been interrupted at all.  “It had been a clear night.  She’d gone out of the bay with a complement of fifty, all there to celebrate the engagement of June Brooks to Lester Dyston.  June, the darling daughter of J. William Brooks of the Portland Brookses —”

“The lumber baron’s family,” Lucy added helpfully.

“— was eighteen and quite a catch.  Dyston was a Midwestern transplant who held some sort of managerial position at Brooks Lumber.  Thirty of Portland’s best families were invited to the celebration.  Many declined because the party was being held in Whale Rock in May, and most weren’t ready to open their beach houses just yet.”

“Lucky most of them did, too,” Lucy said, “or it would have been Portland’s version of the Titanic.”

This time, Denne glared at her.  She shrugged, stuck the cigar back in her mouth, and crossed her arms, as if she thought he’d get the story all wrong.

“The ship went down in the middle of a storm.  Only Dyston survived.  He claimed he was carried to shore by mermaids.”  Denne glanced at Lucy who didn’t even blink.

“And people believed him?” Eddie said.

Denne smiled.  “Maybe not about the mermaids.  But he was young, he was strong, and he was a good swimmer.  Whale Rock isn’t so very far away when the tide is out.”

“So what does this have to with our bodies?” Bishop asked.

“A couple of things.”  Denne stubbed out his half-finished cigarette, grabbed his glass, and downed the scotch like water.  The taste apparently didn’t matter to him any more.  “First, the Sandcastle was built from the old Brooks mansion.  Second, neither the yacht nor the bodies were ever recovered, and third, we have in the cooler, the body of J. William himself.”

Retsler felt a lightness in his stomach that had nothing to do with the beer.  “You’re sure?”

“As sure as I’ll ever be,” Denne said.  “This one came complete with identification.  The watch was engraved, so was his wedding ring.”

“That’s not enough,” Retsler said.

“You’re right.  J. William’s habits were legendary, from his love of a good cigar to his adoration of spicy food.  He nearly lost his right leg in World War One, and from then on, that leg was shorter than the other.  His ulcer operation made medical history at the time.”

“You studied a lot about this man,” Retsler said.

“I had cause.”  Denne let the words hang, but Retsler knew why.  The bodies had been bothering Denne too, only he had some idea where they had come from.  He had been waiting for definitive proof.  And apparently he had found it.

“What convinced you this was Brooks?” Bishop asked.

“The leg might have done it,” Denne said.  “But it was the ulcer scar.  The surgeon stitched the stomach closed, then stitched the skin incision separately.  He removed the external stitches not the internal ones.  That was bad enough, but I could have chalked it up to carelessness.  No.  But that wasn’t it.  It was the stitches themselves.  No one uses wire for sutures these days.  No one has for a long, long time.”

“You’re saying all the bodies came from that ship?” Bishop asked.

Denne nodded.

“So what, they all return on the anniversary of the sinking?” Eddie asked.

“Nothing as romantic as all that,” Denne said.  “The storm last night stirred the ocean.  That ship must have gone down deep, some place cold enough to keep bodies from decaying, to keep clothing intact.”

“And the ocean spits them back up, in the same place?” Eddie asked.  “I don’t think so.”

“Oh, I do,” Denne said.  “A certain kind of tide must bring them out of that place.  Something that happens during storms, maybe, or the storms’ interaction with what’s left of the Rock.  Every now and then the conditions are right, and the sea returns a body.”

“I suppose you believe in mermaids too,” Bishop said.  His words were slightly slurred, his tone odd, almost hopeful.

Denne shook his head.  “I agree with the local police chief.  Dyston sabotaged the yacht, killing everyone on board except himself.”

“How would the chief know that?” Retsler asked.

“Because the lifeboat made it to shore, rope cut, boat empty.  Because all the lifesavers made it too, also empty.  Because a passing fishing boat saw the boy jump over the side while the party was in full swing.  It looked to them like the yacht was in trouble but no one seemed to be noticing.”

“Little vague, I think,” Retsler said.

“No more vague than mermaids,” Denne said.

“You’ve been holding out on me,” Retsler said.

“Maybe.”  Denne stood, and put a twenty on the table.  “Or maybe I made this up to justify my presence in this sleazy little bar.  Goodnight all.”

He shoved his hands in his pockets and picked his way carefully around the wooden tables.  None of the other patrons even seemed to notice him.

“He couldn’t have made it all up,” Eddie said, looking at Lucy.  “You knew about it.”

Lucy nodded.  “My mom kept all the clippings.”

“So why’d he kill them?” Eddie asked.

“Because he was a drifter,” she said.  “Because he was marrying June for her money.”

“Seems to me you don’t kill the golden goose,” Retsler said.

“You do when Daddy reveals your secrets at what should have been your night of triumph, when he humiliates you in front of what must have seemed like the whole world.”

Retsler shook his head.  “Sounds to me more like June had cause to kill Dyston.”

Lucy grinned.  “Don’t look at me.  I’m just telling you what the papers said.  Me, I’ve always believed in the mermaids.”

“They’re not saints either,” Bishop said, and passed out.

***

Charles woke up in his own bed, cold and fully clothed.  His mouth tasted of cotton, and his head ached.  He had gotten drunk, and he had vowed not to.  The sound of running water in the master bath made him sit up, hand to head, trying not to moan.  At first he thought the toilet was running, but the sound was too bathtub-like, too full.

Someone else was in the house.  Visions of Darryl Hannah in Splash, himself as an aging Tom Hanks, made him realize that he was watching too many videos, substituting books and movies for human companionship.

His life had enough drama.

Of course someone else was in the house.  Someone had brought him home.

Besides, it couldn’t be mermaids.  They rarely came into his house.  He only knew of them doing so once.  The night Grace died.

Still, as he stumbled to the bathroom, he couldn’t shake the image of them as he last saw them, looking not lanky and graceful, not the semi-naked beauties of Disney animation or with the erotic suggestiveness of Yeats.  Instead they reminded him of ancient figureheads carved by inexpert sailors, women with eyes that were flat, features rough-hewn, hair plastered to misshapen heads.  Their land legs had feet as big as flippers.  The mermaids walked as if they were in pain — Hans Christian Andersen had gotten that much right — but that could have been as easily caused by the huge feet as “daggers through the flesh.”

So when he entered the bathroom, he was startled to find it empty.  The tub was dry, and the toilet wasn’t running at all.  Not even the faucet in the sink was dripping.  But he hadn’t dreamed the sound.  It continued in the plumbing like a garrulous ghost.

He went down the stairs to the guest bathroom and found it empty too.  The kitchen was as spotless as he had left it, and the washer was off.  No water running anywhere in the house.

Then he looked outside.  Down the hill from him, the sea glowed with its strange luminosity.  A few clouds blew across the moon, but there was no rain.

No water anywhere.

Except in his imagination.

With the mermaids.

***

Not even Dan Retsler had enough guts to go to the Sandcastle at night.  But after he dropped off Bishop — fireman-carried him, actually, upstairs and into bed — he stopped at the bottom of Bishop’s hill and stared at the hotel.

The moon was full and the ocean shone, as it always did at night, as if someone had lit it up from underneath.  The natural light, combined with the street lights, made the west side of Highway 101 as bright as dawn, when the shadows were just receding from the land, replaced by the whitewash of early morning.

The Sandcastle didn’t look like a mansion.  But it didn’t look like a hotel, either.  It was three stories high, rectangular, and had doors every ten feet that faced the highway.  The balconies were made of metal, which were beginning to look red from rust.  The rest of the building was a bright peeling blue.  Someone had added fake turrets on either side — if he hadn’t known better, he would have guessed they were cardboard— and the word “Sandcastle” was painted across one of them in white gothic script.

What kind of man would build a mansion like that?  What kind of heirs would sell it?  Beachfront property was rare on the Oregon Coast, rare and expensive, while the rest of the land was cheap.  He couldn’t imagine what that land would have gone for in 1936, or why, despite the bodies, it still hadn’t sold in 1997.

The turrets, he imagined, were an addition, as were the balconies and the doors, added in the tourist-boom of 1950s  He couldn’t, for the life of him, see the original shape of the building, how all the pieces had once fit together into an elegant whole.

He wasn’t certain why that was important, but he would wager Denne had an idea.  Denne, with his stories about tides and deep cold and bodies remaining preserved for sixty years.  Denne, who clearly believed none of it.

Laughter broke his reverie.  Women’s laughter.  Three women surrounded his car.  Tall women, with straw-like hair, and the ugliest faces he had ever seen.  They had bulging eyes, naturally pursed lips and nearly flat noses.  Fish women, he thought, and shuddered.  He’d had too much to drink.  They leaned on his hood, peered into his windshield and laughed at him.  Their gray-green eyes were the color of the sea on stormy mornings, their skin the same sallow bloodless white of the corpses he’d found on the beach.

“Hey!” he shouted.  “Hey, get away from the car!”

But they didn’t.  They moved closer, like people peering into a fish tank.  He slapped at the windshield, and when they still didn’t move, he punched the horn, quick and loud.

The women jumped away, startled.  The one on the hood rolled off, unable to catch herself.  Her friends disappeared in front of the car, then reappeared in his headlights clutching her and staring at him as if he were more than a curiosity, as if he were a threat.

He tapped the horn one more time, and they backed away from the front of the car.  He turned north on 101, hands shaking, mouth dry.   It wasn’t until he had reached the movie theater a mile away that the realization hit him.

The women hadn’t just been ugly.

They had also been naked.

***

Charles woke after a restless night’s sleep, filled with dreams of running water and bloated, decaying bodies.  His head pounded, and his stomach churned.  The sour taste of gin and tonics coated his tongue.

He sat up, one hand to his head, wondering why he’d let Retsler talk him into going to the False Colors.  He knew better than to drink.  When he drank, he forgot, and when he forgot…

He threw the covers back and stood up, startled at the sudden chill on his legs.  His silk pajama bottoms were missing.  His upper thighs were coated with sand, and a strand of seaweed was wrapped around his left knee.  He got out of bed quickly, his heart pounding.  Maybe he and Retsler had gone down to the beach after they left the bar.  Maybe he had put on his pajama top and had forgotten his bottoms.  Maybe, but not likely.

The house smelled of brine.

And he thought of Grace, feeling that same sickly stab of guilt he always felt when he thought of her.  She had remained trim into her mid-fifties.  Silver hair capping her well shaped head.  Every morning she went down to the beach, the entire beach, legends be damned.

Every morning.

Including the last.

He closed his eyes, and tilted his head back, restraining an anguish so deep he had no words for it.  He should have known.  He should have known yesterday when the body appeared on the beach.  He should have known he would awaken like this.

He had known, and he had ignored it, preferring the company of friends to the silence of the house.  Knowing that only drink would get rid of the images in his mind.

Maybe he had allowed himself to get drunk.  Because he didn’t have the willpower to say no.

“I’m sorry, Grace,” he whispered.  “Sorry for everything.”

But sorry would never ever be enough.

***

“Okay,” Lucy said. “This is what I got.”

She dumped three scrapbooks with black construction paper and cardboard covers on Retsler’s desk. The smell of stale cigar smoke and mildew rose from them.  He pushed his copy of the Oregonian aside.  No newspaper this morning, no surveying the street. These deaths were bothering him, Denne’s comments bothering him even more.

And the three women from the night before, they too had haunted him during his pitifully short sleep.  He had awakened annoyed, his body aching, as though he had been interrupted in the middle of an erotic dream.  Only he hadn’t found the women attractive, nor the dream in the least way sexual.

“Dan,” Lucy said.  “You gonna look or should I take these away?”

Her voice snapped him out of his reverie.  He wasn’t a teenager any more.  He really needed a full night’s sleep.

“No,” he said.  “No, I’m going to look.”  He smiled at her, and took the notebooks.  He was wrong about the material on the covers. It wasn’t a cardboard and construction paper combination but something that felt like both of them and neither at the same time.  The scrapbooks were bound with a thick gold string.

“Well, don’t rip nothing,” Lucy said.  She picked up his newspaper and went back to her desk.

He opened the first notebook carefully.  The front page of the local weekly, the News Guard, from 1936 flapped at him.  The paper was brittle and was held in place by tape so yellow it nearly looked brown.  Beneath the page, in small black script, someone had written: Accident at Whale Rock.

At first, he didn’t read the articles.  He merely scanned them, thumbing his way through the entire notebook.  When he reached the end, he realized that this was more than a curiosity to Lucy.  She had been six when the accident happened.  Someone else had kept the notebooks and passed them on to Lucy in later years.

He almost asked her whose notebooks they had been.  Almost.  He wasn’t ready to hear.  He needed to study the clippings first.

The first notebook held only clippings from the News Guard.  The second notebook held clippings from papers as diverse as the Oregonian and The New York Times.  The death of J. William and his friends sent a ripple through the national financial community, a ripple that became evident almost immediately.  J. William was an old-time fiscal conservative, with ties all over the Northwest.  He had fought the bids for dams on the Columbia.  He had fought the arrival of federal money into Oregon.  He had lost the battles twice, but during the spring of 1936, he was working against Roosevelt, against the New Dealers, and against the flow of federal money.  If he hadn’t died, if he hadn’t lost, Pacific Northwest would have looked completely different.  No public funds would have supported the Bonneville Power Administration.  No defense contracts would have flowed to Seattle.

The  money would have stayed with J. William Brooks and his friends.

The national papers called the destruction of the yacht murder.  And some papers claimed that Lester Dyston was part of a larger conspiracy.  The conspiracy of the New Dealers to rid themselves of the conservative Northwest factions, the friends of J. William Brook.  The papers claimed the trial, its mockery of justice, and its result proved the conspiracy, but nothing was ever done about it.

None of those facts made it to the News Guard.  The local paper focused solely on the issue of mermaids.

***

Charles took a long hot shower.  Steam rose around him as he washed off the sand.  He had hidden the seaweed in toilet paper and flushed it, never wanting to look at it again.

Then, when he was done, he wrapped himself in a big fluffy towel and stepped out of the stall, pausing for a moment at the tiny bathroom window with its view of the sea.

The  morning ocean was multicolored: the front section a steely blue, the middle a solid gray, and the section near the horizon golden where the sun broke through the clouds.  Gulls sat on the roof of the Sandcastle as they always did, but none dove, none circled, none flocked.

He swallowed and leaned his head against the cool glass, cursing the day he had bought the house.  The day after he and Grace had moved in, they had showered together, then stood before this window, marveling at their luck.  That afternoon, they had walked to the beach and he had found a bottle with a half torn label that read Château Lafite-Rothschild 1924, covered with seaweed and still chilled from its days in the ocean.  Pulling it out of the sand had reminded him, even then, of that scene in Notorious where Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant watch as Claude Rains poured uranium dust from a wine bottle. Grace had wanted to leave the bottle, but Charles had not.  He had taken it, thanked the ocean for her gift, and brought it to the house.  They had wine with their fresh halibut dinner that night.  Grace had taken one sip and declared the wine vinegar, but he believed her palate was off.  It was, quite simply, the best wine he had ever tasted, and he drank the entire bottle himself.

That night, after Grace fell asleep, he had wandered drunkenly down to the beach. He had later told her he had blundered into the surf, and she had scolded him for his carelessness, made him promise to never do so again, afraid he would die from exposure or drowning or his own drunken stupidity.

But he had lied to her.  He had not touched the water.  His memory, his dreams, were of a song as fine as the wine, the ocean singing, he had thought, and he had followed that sound to the Sandcastle, to the beach.  The Sandcastle had been lit from the inside, and he followed the lights through the open doorway into a polished oak hallway and a magnificent staircase covered with a red carpet.  A mirror covered the wall on the first landing, and he saw himself as he thought of himself, a slim middling handsome man in his early twenties, looking young and bewildered in the soft light.  He wore a tuxedo of a type he had never had in real life, complete with spats, tails, and a top hat.  The outfit gave him a dignity he had never had before.

The music carried him upstairs into the open door of a darkened bedroom.  As he stepped inside, a woman with cool hands touched his face, removed his hat, and he thought, started to undress him, until he realized that the hands below belonged to another woman.  The second woman unbuttoned his fly and took him in her mouth.  Her lips and tongue were cool and refreshing, and he was instantly more aroused than he had ever been in his life.

The first woman undressed him, not allowing him to participate, and when he was naked, she guided him to the bed.  The second woman continued her fellatio, and as they eased him onto velvet spread, he felt the presence of a third woman.

He was getting hard remembering.  He groaned and pulled away from the window, hand on the wall to steady himself.  His memory of that night was of mouths all over him, cool mouths, caressing him like rain.  And when he came — and he did come, in powerful pulsing spasms, more powerful than anything he had experienced before — it felt as if his essence were flowing outward and joining a vast ocean of sensation, like a river flowing into the sea.

The next morning he had awakened in his own bed, covered with seaweed and sand and tiny bite marks that looked like the circles left by octopus suckers.

He knew that the circle marks would be on him this morning, but he hadn’t looked.  He couldn’t face it, just like he couldn’t face any memory of the experience the night before.  He had touched the women only once, and had felt hair like straw and skin like scales.  From that moment on, he had let them do to him whatever they wanted, allowing his hands to be held captive while they marked him with their mouths.  The experience was never as erotic as the first time.  The first time he had thought it all a drunken dream and later when he realized it was real and he was being unfaithful to Grace, his mind rebelled and his body was unable to stop.

Then, after Grace died, he had stopped drinking, and the women had stopped visiting.  Except for last night.  Except for last night, and a handful of sloppy self-pitying nights when the loneliness was so bad, that a touch, any touch, even their touch was preferable to none.

His stomach spasmed and he swallowed, barely able to keep the contents down.  The self-loathing returned, the self-loathing that grew worse each time.

Each time Grace’s killers summoned him, and he went, valuing the ecstasy they gave him more than life itself.

***

Retsler rested his chin on his hands, staring at the two page spread from the News Guard in December of 1937.  Dyston’s trial had been held in Newport, and it had drawn people from all over the world.  The grainy, poorly reproduced photographs made the tiny courthouse look as if it were under siege: a Simpson-esque circus long before O.J. Simpson was even born.

The paper dutifully reported the case, until the day Dyston testified.  And then the paper had reprinted the testimony, using ellipsis and editorial comments in brackets as it cut out sections it deemed unworthy for a family newspaper.

Retsler couldn’t believe what he was reading.  If it hadn’t been on the same yellowing newsprint, if the same brittle tape weren’t holding the pages in place, he would have thought Lucy was playing a trick on him.  Even then he wasn’t entirely sure.

“Luce!” he shouted.

She set down her cigar and stood with a dignity foreign to her.  She had been listening to the pages turn, waiting for just this moment.  And somehow that thought unnerved him.

She came inside his office and closed the door.  They were the only two in the building.  Closing the door seemed unnecessary.

“He testified about the mermaids?” he asked, his tone deliberately ironic.

“You’re reading the transcript,” she said.  Her expression was guarded, her voice flat.  She used this tone with dumb tourists — “tourons,” she called them.  Tourist-morons.

“Tuxedos?  A gift of wine from the sea?  Destroying his one true love?  He was delusional.”

“He was telling the truth,” she said.

“He was nuts.  He should never have been allowed to testify,” Retsler said.  He closed the notebook.  “No wonder the national press was so angry that he was acquitted.  He should have at least been institutionalized.  I don’t know how a jury could have let him off.”

“They were a jury of his peers,” she said softly.

She was serious, more serious than he’d ever seen her.  She believed this too, although he didn’t know why.  A small shiver ran down his back, raising goosebumps on his flesh.  And for an instant, those naked women flashed through his mind, their mouths pressed against his windshield.  Their tongues had a suction cup on the tip, leaving small dime-shaped impressions on the glass.

“That’s nonsense,” he said, as much to her as to himself.

She took the notebooks and hugged them to her chest.  She studied him, the reserve gone.  “Have you taken any gifts from the sea?” she asked.

“Only the bodies,” he said.

“Those aren’t gifts,” she said.  “They’re warnings.”

“Of what?”

She shook her head, more serious than he had ever seen her.  “I wish I knew.”

***

After his second shower of the day and a meager meal of tea and dry toast, Charles made his way down the rickety steps into his wine cellar.  He wasn’t feeling well: dizzy, hung-over, and angry at himself for being weak yet again.  He couldn’t believe that Grace would forgive him if she knew — his sins had gone long past forgiveness.  All he could hope for now was that death was truly an oblivion, and not that all-knowing, all-seeing place some religions made it out to be.

A cobweb brushed against his face as he stepped onto the thin carpet.  The cellar was cooler than the rest of the house and smelled faintly damp, the effects of living on the coast.  Bottles of wine shone in the light from a single bulb.  He and Grace had built up this collection, and he hadn’t touched it since she died.

But he still knew where the bottle was.  He had kept it, a compulsion he had, like all the others since he’d come here.  Compulsions he hadn’t tried to deny.

He didn’t know why he was trying now.  Perhaps there truly was, as some people said, a last straw.  And perhaps it was tiny, a small thing immeasurable by real world standards.

Perhaps.

Or perhaps he had been planning this since the first time he knew the women were real, and he had finally gained enough courage.

Or perhaps he finally realized he had nothing to lose.

He rounded the corner, and grabbed the bottle from its bin.  The bottle was made of thick glass.  The torn label was still there — funny that neither he nor Grace had commented on that, considering how long they had thought the bottle had been in the water — and the bottle felt full, even though he knew he had polished it off on his own.  He had saved it as a memento, thinking somehow that the bottle alone would be worth money, not knowing, instead, it would cost him his soul.

He clutched the bottle to his chest and headed out of the wine cellar.  He would grab his coat and go to the beach.

To the Sandcastle.

Alone.

***

The Glen Ellyn Lodge stood atop a cliff face overlooking the ocean.  Behind the lodge was one of the most spectacular private golf courses in the nation, and beside the fairways stood the homes of Whale Rock’s rich.

Retsler hated going there.  He thought the fact that it was a gated community appropriate to its attitudes, its snob appeal, its closed-mindedness.

But he parked in the lot reserved for guests and went inside the seventy-year old structure, knowing he would find Denne in its dining room, surrounded by Whale Rock’s elite, and staring down at the ocean.

The lodge was decorated like an English country manor, in dark woods, with hunting greens and browns on the carpet and upholstery.  A fire burned in the stone fireplace, and from the dining room came the sound of soft voices and the clink of glasses.  The maitre d’, a man Retsler had gone to high school with, raised a single eyebrow.

“Business,” Retsler said, and slipped by.  He turned the corner and stepped into what he considered to be the most spectacular room on the Oregon Coast.

The greens and browns continued in here, but they were nearly invisible compared to the view.  The architect had let the ocean speak for itself.  The walls were made of paneled glass, with only the water and the sky visible on all three sides.  It felt as if a person was outside, without the wind and the chill and the hint of spray rising from the surf below.

Denne sat alone in a corner table, cigarette in one hand, glasses on the end of his nose, peering at the Wall Street Journal.  Retsler crossed the room, ignoring the other patrons who surreptitiously watched him, and sat across from Denne.

“You knew about the mermaids, didn’t you?” Retsler asked.

Denne folded his paper, removed his glasses and set the cigarette in a cutglass ashtray.  “Hello, Dan,” he said as if Retsler hadn’t spoken.  “Would you like a cocktail?  Or perhaps a bit of lunch?”

“Mermaids,” Retsler said.  He was exhausted and not in the mood to be civil.

“Of course I knew about them,” Denne said.  “I told you about them when I told you about the Lady June.”  He had lowered his voice and leaned forward as he spoke.

“You knew about Dyston’s testimony?  About the idea that mythical creatures trashed the entire yacht in order to have him to themselves, to get rid of the competition?”

“I find it amazing the man was not committed,” Denne said.  He picked up his cigarette.  “Now, if you’re not going to have lunch, then let me get back to my paper.”

Retsler put his hand on the paper, pushing it flat.  “Lucy says other locals have seen the mermaids.”

“You’re local.  Have you?” Denne asked.

The three women surrounding his car rose in his mind.  He swallowed.

Denne’s small, superior smile faded.  His face drained of color.  “Have you?” he whispered.

“I saw three strange women last night.  I had just poured Charles home.  They were at the base of the hill.”

“On land.”

Retsler nodded.

“And did you hear anything odd or unusual?”

“No,” Retsler said.

Denne let out a small sigh.

“You believe Dyston’s story, don’t you?”

Denne gazed out the window.  The sea crashed and boomed against the rocks below, the sound loud over the hushed voices around them.  “My father talked of them,” he said softly.  “After my mother died.  He killed himself, you know.”

“No, I didn’t know.”

Denne’s smile was small, tight.  “It wasn’t a surprise.  He drank too much, blamed himself for her death.  He sent me away, made me promise never to come back.”

“But you did.”

“Of course.”

“And you believe in the mermaids?”

Denne took a deep breath, and met Retsler’s gaze.  “I don’t go to the beach alone.  Neither does my wife.  And on nights, when the moon is full, I sleep with the windows closed, with earplugs in both ears, and the stereo on.”

Retsler frowned.  “Because of mermaids?”

“Because of the mermaids,” he said.

***

In the daylight, the Sandcastle looked like a gothic ruin.  Its blue paint was peeling, and the fake facades were crumbling.  Vandals had broken through the plywood over the windows, revealing the wide staircase from Charles’ dream/vision.  The carpet was rotted, the mirrors smashed, and the stairs rotted through.  He shivered just looking at it.

Charles clutched the bottle to his chest, and made his way to the hotel’s beach access.  High tides had broken the stone steps, and the metal rail added decades ago had rusted through.  He went down the steps gingerly, one hand on the stone wall for balance.

The sea was loud here, louder than anywhere else on the coast.  He remembered remarking on that to Grace the night they had come down, the night they had found the bottle.  He had noticed it again when he found her body almost a year later.

He knew why they had taken her.  Just the night before he had spoken to them, told them he had someone else, someone he loved, and that he wanted them to leave him alone.  He had left, thinking he was safe.  The next morning, the gulls had circled, and he had found Grace’s body, lying in a tidal pool near the edge of the Sandcastle Motel.  Denne had ruled it accidental, death by drowning, and there was nothing to prove otherwise.

Nothing except Charles’ feeling, nothing except the mermaids’ sense of triumph each time they encircled him and made him theirs.

The wind was cool and damp.  It carried small grains of sand that pelted him as he stepped out of the protection of the stairwell.  This section of beach was completely deserted.  Not even a gull sat at the water’s edge.  The sand was thin, revealing the thick black lava rock beneath.  Only the ocean seemed alive, booming and cascading along the rocks with more energy than he had ever had.

He used to think of the ocean as a vast desert.  It always made him marvel at the ancient sailors’ ability to navigate such a broad and empty expanse.  He had wondered, early in his enchantment, how the mermaids did the same.  He doubted they used stars, and he wondered about the consistency of the ocean bottom.  It wasn’t until he realized that the bodies turned up on shore the very day the mermaids would summon him that he knew what happened.

The mermaids lived near the Sandcastle, and when they wanted his attention, they used the bodies as a calling card.

There was no calling card today.  Only him, the ocean, and the broad expanse of sky.  He scrambled onto the rocks, his feet slipping on the wet sand.  The bottle grew heavy in his arms.  He had to get close to the water.  He was not as strong as he used to be.  With his right hand, he grabbed the bottle by its neck, and picked a spot farther out, a spot where the ocean was almost black, and threw with all his strength.

The bottle spun in the air, its brown sides catching the light, winking at him.  He wished, at this moment, that he could see in black and white.  This part of his life needed to be like a noir film, all darkness and shadows, with the light shimmering high and out of reach.

Then the bottle hit the water and disappeared into the darkness.  He waited a moment, to see if it would surface, and it did not.   A relief so profound it was almost sexual ran through him.  He let out a sigh, turned and scrabbled along the rocks.

The ocean boomed behind him, and a thin wave, nearly gone, wrapped itself around his shoes.  Hands gripped him from behind, scaly hands, clawlike hands, and hair coarse as straw blew across his face.  Now he knew why he’d been thinking of death all day, why he had made this choice at this moment.

He had never had enough courage to do things on his own.  He had always needed help.

He turned, and for the first time ever, returned the mermaids’ embrace.

***

As Retsler drove back to Whale Rock, he couldn’t shake a feeling of unease.  Denne’s words kept circling through his mind. Mermaids and fear.  Too many people taking such a preposterous thing so seriously.

He needed to talk to Bishop, to see why he had mentioned them the night before.

But as Retsler crested the rise near the Sandcastle, he saw gulls.  Hundreds of them, swarming, filling the blue-gray sky.  The Sandcastle was nearly blanketed with them, and with all the falling feathers, the neighborhood looked as if it were buried in snow.

He picked up the radio.  “Luce,” he said.  “Any call from Bishop?”

“No,” she said.  “Should there have been?”

“We have gulls at the Sandcastle.  Send Eddie down, would you?”

“And the coroner?” she asked.

He took a deep breath.  “I’ll let you know.”

He clipped the receiver back onto the radio, and drove into the turn-out.  His blue Taurus slid on the gravel before stopping.  He had been driving too fast.  As usual.

He got out, heart pounding.  He wasn’t used to being alone on this stretch of highway.  The gulls were thick.  He wasn’t sure he’d be able to get down to the beach without Eddie’s help.

Retsler reached into the backseat and removed his bullhorn.  He hadn’t brought the rifle.  All he had was his service revolver.  He promised himself he wouldn’t get too close.

He walked along the narrow footpath and down the stairs.  The gulls covered the beach like a blanket — too many for him to approach.  But he didn’t need to.  The corpse was leaning against the rock retaining wall, body intact except for the missing eyes.  A single gull stood on the corpse’s wet hair,  but the others kept their distance, as if showing Retsler the kill.

The kill.

His friend.

Charles Bishop.  Clearly and irrevocably dead.

Retsler felt bile rise in his throat, and he swallowed, keeping control as best he could.  He had taken Bishop home the night before, he knew he had.  Besides, Bishop was dressed differently.

Bishop had come down here, alone, for no apparent reason at all.

Retsler backed away, never taking his gaze off the birds.  One false move and they would swarm him too.

It wasn’t until he reached the narrow footpath that he started to run.

***

That night, Lucy forced him to go to the False Colors.  She was afraid he would go home and brood.  He didn’t know how brooding in public was any different from brooding alone, so he went along.  He sat in a dark corner of the bar, listening to Lucy chatter about the day’s silliest events.  Eddie nursed a long-neck and listened as well.

It felt as if they had lost one of their own.

Retsler couldn’t get Bishop’s body from his mind, the mocking position it had been left in.  Just as his wife’s had been.

And the last thing Bishop said before he passed out at this very bar the night before.  He was talking about mermaids.  He’d sounded wistful.  As if he knew.

“Dan?” Lucy’s voice was soft, as if she’d been trying to reach him more than once.  “We can talk about Charles if you like.”

He didn’t like.  He took a sip from the local stout and shook his head.  There was nothing he could do.  He’d stood beside Denne during the autopsy, saw all the evidence.  Bishop had drowned.  Just like his wife had.  Denne ruled it accidental death, but he said he could have ruled suicide just as easily.

There was nothing Retsler could do, and that galled him even more.

He drained his third pint of stout and stood, a bit more unsteadily than he had thought he would.

“Dan?” Lucy asked.

“Going home,” he said.

“I’ll drive you.”

He shook his head.  She’d had more to drink than he had.  “I’ll walk.”

He grabbed his windbreaker and swung it over his shoulders, then went out the bar’s back door.  The night was clear, the stars dabbed across the heavens like spots of white in black velvet canvas.  The cool salty air refreshed him just enough, and he followed the footpath down to the beach.

The False Colors was nearly four miles away from the Sandcastle, and his home was between them both.  He’d walked the beach home numerous times without a twinge.  But this time, when he reached the deep brown sand farthest from the ocean, his heart did a double-flip.

The salty freshness had changed.  There was another smell here, a bitter, biting scent that he associated with death.  His stomach flipped again and he winced.  Tonight he would have to find another way home.

He turned, and his boot hit something hard in the sand.  He peered down, expecting a rock, and seeing instead a bottle filled with liquid.

“Damn tourists,” he said, and swept it up, realizing as his fingers touched it that the bottle was old and still damp from the sea.  Its label was torn in half, and in the light from the beach front hotels he could just parse out some French words, and a date: 1924.

Wine, old and expensive.  He grinned. He would give it to Denne.  Denne liked expensive things.

Retsler tucked the bottle under his arm, and had already reached the footpath, when the hair on the back of his neck stood on end.  He removed the bottle once more, and looked at it, heart pounding.

An expensive bottle of wine.  Bottled before 1936.  When the Lady June went down.  This was another gift from the sea.  A benign one, perhaps, but still a gift from a tragedy best laid to rest.

Besides, how did a wet bottle appear in dry sand?  Tourists, he thought again.

Or mermaids.

And what if they were existed?  What if, after he took their gift, he could hear their song?  And what if it lured him, like it had lured Dyston?  He had no girlfriend to drown. But he had friends.  So many friends.

God, he was drunk.  He would never have believed these thoughts sober.  He staggered back down the path until he reached the sand.  He slogged through it, reaching the water’s edge.  A black spot the size of a child’s wading pool proved a perfect target.  He raised the bottle and threw it into the darkness.

The bottle landed in the inky spot with a splash.  Concentric circles flared outward.  A cool breeze touched him, and for a moment he felt suddenly sober.  Too sober.  Then the surface of the water smoothed, and his mouth went dry.

A woman rose out of the darkness.  She had bulging eyes and a flat nose.  Her long wet hair flowed along her neck and shoulders like seaweed.  She clutched the bottle against her large breasts.

All the light from the area seemed focused on her.  Her white skin seemed even whiter against the dark backdrop of the sky and sea.

When she saw him, she smiled. The smile was benign, almost questioning.  She held out the bottle, as if he hadn’t understood the invitation.

He shook his head.  He had seen the results of gifts from the sea and he wanted no part of it.  But he was so aroused his body hurt.  How did that happen?  He thought she was ugliest woman he had ever seen.

“No,” he said.  “No.  Thank you, but no.”

Her smile faded.  She sank beneath the water as if she had never been.  With her went his arousal, and in place of it, he felt a vague unease in the pit of his stomach.

A wind whipped up.  Waves the size of trees formed at the inky spot and headed toward shore.  He backed away, never taking his gaze from the ocean, until his feet hit the footpath.  Then he started to run.

Gulls dive-bombed him, cawing as they swooped near his face.  He covered his eyes, and bowed his head, peering through his fingers as he negotiated the path.  Things brushed his hair, and droppings fell all over him.  He let one hand fall to his side, slid the other arm across his eyes, and reached for his service revolver.  He grabbed it and shot skyward, the bang startlingly loud.

The cawing stopped.  The rustle of wings disappeared.  He sat abruptly and watched as fifty gulls flew heavenward, their white feathers the color of stars.  He had never seen a gull at night before.  A chill ran down his spine, and he remembered some movie he had seen as a kid, a Hitchcock movie about birds going out of control, attacking for no reason.  It had terrified him, that movie, because those birds seemed like real birds, their behavior as cold and inexplicable as the sea.

The gulls were gone.  He was alone, covered in bird droppings and feathers, and feeling shaky.

He had refused.  He had refused the gift from the sea.  And the birds, the woman, they had been angry at him, but they hadn’t hurt him.

They hadn’t touched him.

He had survived the curse, something Dyston hadn’t been able to do.  Something, Retsler suspected, his friend Bishop hadn’t been able to do either.

“God, Bishop,” he whispered, “if you’d only talked about it.”

But Retsler wouldn’t have believed Bishop if Bishop had told him.  Retsler wouldn’t have believed unless confronted with it himself.

Mermaids did hunt along the beach.

And they were as natural as birds, plucking eyeballs from the dead.

The Women of Whale Rock

Copyright © by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Published by WMG Publishing

Cover and Layout copyright © WMG Publishing

Cover design by WMG Publishing

Cover art copyright © Katarzyna Mróz/DepositPhotos

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

Any use of this publication to train generative artificial intelligence (“AI”) technologies is expressly prohibited. The author and publisher reserve all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

As I compiled this, I realized that I am the only one who really knows Seavy County. It encompasses every genre from dark fantasy to science fiction to crime to romance, with a bit of literary mixed in.

Since the Kickstarter is for all of the Seavy County tales, I figured I’d familiarize you with them over the next several days.

We’ll start with the three novels that everyone will get with this Kickstarter. In the 1990s, Façade was one of the first books published in a brand-new horror book line here in the U.S. That line wasn’t really horror so much as dark fantasy. This book is closer to horror than anything else in this Kickstarter.

One note about the Kickstarter: If we hit all of our stretch goals, you will get stories of all the different genres. The three novels in the banner are fantasy, but the bonus novel (if we hit 125 backers) is a dark romance. The collections feature several genres, including sf and crime. To sample the crime fiction, check out this week’s Free Fiction Monday story, “Heroics.”

Here’s the blurb for Façade:

Thomas’s estranged daughter Heather died on the Oregon Coast. Thomas returns there, not to solve his daughter’s murder, but to see if he can live with himself and his past. Only someone leaves mysterious notes and birds die on his porch. Something strange lurks in the shadows. When more people die, Thomas realizes he alone can solve the crisis, if he only dares…

“…an exceptionally effective casebook of abnormal psychology…Rich and revelatory.  The ending is perfect.” —Locus

You can get your copy along with two other books and so much more on the Seavy County Kickstarter.

The book did get me my second editor at the publishing house, a great woman who helped with my Kris Nelscott books. But we couldn’t do anything about the nightmare that the book had been trapped in.

Ten years later, one of the reviewers who saw the book, got hired by a British company as the head of a noir book line. His first purchase? My book. He treated it well, but refused to change anything about it, including the awful title. (Which I will not tell you. The title is listed on the copyright page. You can look later.)

The book sold well and got great reviews. Then the book line vanished, and the book went out of print.

We’ve finally brought it back in the author-preferred edition with the title the book had in the beginning. You crime readers will understand why Consecrated Ground is the right title for this story. The title goes directly to the story’s theme.

When this book initially appeared, it was historical fiction. Now it has a resonance with our current lives. Sadly. Anyway, you can get the ebook right away. The paper editions are still in production. I’ll let you know when they appear.

You can get the book at any ebook retailer or follow this link: https://wmgbooks.com/products/preorder-consecrated-ground-available-09-08-2026

Voted one of the top ten stories of the year by Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine readers.

“Heroics” is free on this website for one week only. It is also available in Coastal Incidents: A Seavy County Crime Collection, which you can get in the Seavy County Kickstarter . Click here to see the Kickstarter. If you would just like your own personal copy of the story, you can find it on any retail site or you can get your copy on WMG’s site by clicking here.

Seavy County stories run the gamut of genres, from dark fantasy to romance to crime to science fiction. The common thread is Seavy County itself, where the dark and the fog provoke all kinds of strange happenings…

Heroics

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

He had gotten it all wrong.

His body no longer worked the way it wanted to. He had always ignored that, thinking his heroes could survive anything.

He could survive anything.

Sobel lay facedown in a pile of leaves, the smell of decaying vegetation rich in his nostrils. The ground was cold and damp, the chill seeping through his flannel shirt and the knees of his jeans. His feet were twisted awkwardly, but he felt no pain there, nothing except the throbbing in his arm, trapped beneath him like a wounded animal.

He rolled on his good side, felt his arm flop against his stomach, and the agony, so sharp that the world went white for a moment. The shove had sent him over the embankment, down the hill—he remembered soaring, swearing, thinking of Sarah, alone up there with them—and then the ground rushing toward him. He put his arms out to brace himself, to break the fall, underestimating both his own weight and the speed he’d been dropping. He’d heard the snap—snaps—three at least—and then the pain that blotted out the urgency, the fear, the anger.

He thought of pushing himself up, imagined climbing the embankment like Jackson Ross, his fictional alter ego, and saving Sarah. Jackson would have gotten up immediately, would have used the broken limb to pull himself up the hill despite the pain.

Sobel had no idea how long he had been un- or semi-conscious. Long enough for them to climb down the hill, check him for dead and leave, presumably with Sarah in tow. Why would they want her? An innocent three-year-old with eyes as big as the world. Not his, not yet. Not legally anyway. The adoption papers were ready and would be signed before he married JoAnn.

JoAnn, who was in New York, spending a couple thousand dollars of his fortune to buy a wedding dress so secret that he couldn’t even be in the same city with her. She had left Sarah with him.

For safekeeping.

He pushed himself into a sitting position, and felt his closed Swiss Army knife press against his left thigh. For a moment that was the only sensation, and then he realized he was dizzy. The blood staining the leaves; the way his breath came shallowly; the clammy feel of his skin all added to his queasiness. He touched his face, felt stickiness, knew that was where the blood was coming from. Cuts, bruises. He probably had them all over. He was in shock, no doubt about it. He was in shock and he probably wasn’t thinking clearly.

But to stay here was wrong.

He braced himself with his good hand and got to his feet, swaying slightly. The air smelled of smoke—fall in Oregon—and the sky was dark gray. It was probably going to start raining soon.

He sighed and looked up the embankment. Steep, even with two hands. There was no easy path. He would have to climb.

The embankment was wet too, the ground soft. He stuck his right foot into the dirt experimentally, found that it gave easily. He could create his own stairs. Water seeped into his leather shoes, but he didn’t care. He had to get up to the car. Once he was there, he would figure out what to do.

Right foot, left foot, right hand clawing the mud. The movements slightly uncoordinated. He hadn’t realized how much the use of his other arm added to his balance. It bobbed against his side, a long aching morass that sometimes became sharp and stabbing if the arm bounced too hard.

They had caught him off guard. Two cars, one following closely from Grand Ronde, the other crossing the line in the Van Duzer Corridor, forcing him to either drive off the road or hit the oncoming car. He’d been trapped by the hill on one side, and the embankment on the other, the narrow road curving ahead of him and behind. There was a small shoulder—the only measure of safety—and he took it without thinking.

He’d locked the doors and speed-dialed the hands-free phone on the dash, keeping the car running. They’d boxed him in, behind and in front, leaving him no room to turn on the narrow highway, no escape.

Is this a game, Max? Sarah asked, her little voice quivering. Even she had known something was wrong, strapped into the child-seat in the back, watching the men approach.

At the last minute, he’d decided to hit the cars—they were all stopped and it would be easy. His airbag would deploy, but he’d deal with it. He had to.

As he shoved the car into reverse—a mistake, he knew now, because they had seen the lights—the men who had gotten out of the car behind him shot out his tires. The explosions echoed in the afternoon stillness, making Sarah scream.

The 911 operator answered right at that point, and he was trying to drive even with the shot-out tires, trying to talk to her, trying to keep the car between him and the men walking toward it. Sarah was crying, and he couldn’t see a mile-marker. He didn’t know exactly where he was, and the stupid operator was trying to figure out jurisdiction of all things, when he and Sarah might have been shot.

Then they got to the door, used the keyless entry to unlock the door. It shouldn’t have worked but it did, making the little click-click as the locks rose. The smallest man opened the rear passenger door and pulled Sarah out, car seat and all.

Noooo! Max had shouted, reaching for her, then he felt cold air as his door opened. A gun pressed against the back of his head.

Foot, hand, foot. He was nearly to the top. A diesel truck went by, rumbling the road. Didn’t anyone see his shot-up car? Hadn’t anyone thought to stop, get out, and help?

He pulled himself up, saw the reassuring dark blue of his Lexus and found himself wishing he had a new one, with the on-board guidance system. He would have been pinpointed then. They would have found him, quickly and easily.

But despite the Hollywood money, the increased book sales thanks to three successful Jackson Ross movies, Sobel had still been fiscally conservative. He’d seen no reason to buy a new car when the old one was paid off and worked just fine.

How was he supposed to know that it was going to be important?

The car looked as wounded as he felt, leaning awkwardly on its shot-out tires. The doors were closed, although he remembered leaving his open, and there was no trace of Sarah inside.

His stomach churned. Why would they take her? Had they followed him from Portland? He’d spent the night after taking JoAnn to the airport, done a bit of research at Powell’s, and left Sarah with a close friend who often babysat for them. He didn’t notice anyone following him after he picked Sarah up. When they had lunch, he saw nothing out of the ordinary in the restaurant, although he wasn’t sure how he would have noticed. Coping with a three-year-old who was determined to get pie first took most of his energies.

This didn’t seem random. And that scared him more than anything.

He reached the car and peered inside, saw the stuffed dog he’d bought Sarah days ago, felt his heart twist. How she looked at him. How she trusted him.

God knew what they were doing with her. Doing to her.

And why.

His briefcase was still in the back. He pulled open the back driver’s side door, reached in, felt his left arm sway, prayed it wouldn’t hit anything. Fingers brushed against the edge, but he was getting used to the pain. Or maybe he was numb. Blessedly numb.

He opened the briefcase, saw his laptop, his business papers, his extra credit card. And his cellphone. His pager. How strange. They should have taken everything, shot out the hands-free phone, the ignition, made sure he was stranded.

But they hadn’t.

He picked up the cell, speed-dialed 911, identified himself as the man who had called before. He probably should have just spoken to the hand-held. He wondered if the men had even bothered to disable it.

“Stay there, sir,” the dispatch said. “The county sheriff and an ambulance will be there momentarily.”

How, he wondered, when they didn’t know where there was? He supposed it didn’t matter. The highway was the only way through the Corridor. They probably figured they’d stumble on him soon enough.

“They took Sarah.” His voice sounded thick and muzzy to his own ears.

“Are you injured, sir?” Apparently the dispatch had picked up on that. Maybe he sounded worse that he thought.

“Broken arm, I think. But Sarah—”

“Sarah is?”

“My daughter. Nearly. I’m adopting her. I just got the papers.” Not relevant. He usually was relevant when he spoke. Focus. Focus.

“How old is she?”

“Three.”

The dispatch was keeping him talking until the help arrived. His brain was working slowly, but it was working. He stared at the tire tracks on the gravel, at the road. No other cars had passed. Just the few he’d heard, marring the oil path….

Oil path. From the gravel. He tracked it, saw a variegated puddle exactly where the back car had been parked. It had been leaking oil.

“…sir? Are you all right?”

Apparently she’d been talking to him. He hadn’t even heard.

“Wait,” he said. “I see something.”

“Something?”

He left the line open and walked beside the trail, realizing almost too late that he had gone on the highway without looking. Focus. He had to focus. If he wasn’t clear, he wouldn’t be of any help.

Why was the oil trail crossing the road horizontally? It headed straight toward the hill. It didn’t make an obvious U-turn.

“Sir?” The tiny voice of the dispatch sounded panicked.

“Just a minute,” he said.

He followed the trail to the south face of the hill, onto the gravel shoulder, where the oil became black rock. A wide U-turn then. He felt a deep disappointment combined with slight wooziness.

This time, going back to his car, he would be cautious. He walked to the edge of the curve, looked east, saw no cars.

And no oil trail.

“Sir?”

He didn’t answer. He was spinning, looking for the oil. It had to be here. It had to be—

The road was almost invisible, cutting through the trees. It looked like a path, overgrown and neglected, but it was wide enough for cars. Trees and shrubs grew over the road, but some of the branches were broken. He jogged toward them, then quit almost immediately as the pain in his bobbing arm made him gasp.

“Sir?”

The oil was there, black and familiar, like a trail of breadcrumbs. Follow me. Follow me.

“Sir?” The poor dispatch sounded panicked now. Funny, he should be the one who was panicked, but he felt strangely calm. “Sir? If you’re there—”

“I found something,” he said. “One of the cars was leaking oil. It went up a side road just near my car. On the other side of the highway. I’m going to follow it.”

“No, sir. Stay there. When the sheriff arrives—”

“It might be too late. Sarah’s alone with them. She’s only three. I’m heading up. I’m bringing the phone.” As if that made it better. He wasn’t sure what he could do. But he couldn’t leave her up there, alone, those wide brown eyes scanning for him, pudgy hands waving, demanding.

If she were alive.

He closed his eyes, swayed again. Water. He was probably dehydrated. He went back to his car, put on the flashers so that the cops wouldn’t miss him, and then reached into his briefcase, made a small map pointing the way to that road. He didn’t trust anything to fate, not this time. Not with Sarah at stake.

A truck roared by, spattering him with dust and gravel. Exhaust fumes floated past him, adding to his dizziness. He reached across the back seat, grabbed the bottle of water he’d hardly touched on the drive, worked the cap off with his good hand, and drank. The water was warm, but it tasted wonderful, better than water ever had before. He made himself drink all of it, and as he did, his gaze fell on one of JoAnn’s scarves, crumpled under the seat.

He let out a little sigh. It would help, that scarf. It wasn’t as good as a gun, but it was something. He pried the scarf free, its silk edge feeling fragile beneath his fingertips. But silk was a strong fiber, right? He seemed to remember that from his reading. Silk was one of those miracle fibers.

He hoped.

With his teeth and his good hand, he managed to tie a knot in the scarf. Then he struggled to get it over his head. That was harder than he’d imagined—the little jolts of pain making him gasp. Once the sling was on, sliding his arm into place was even more difficult. At one point, he had to lean against the car and force himself to breathe evenly to keep from passing out.

When it was done, though, he felt an odd relief. His shoulder wasn’t supporting the dead weight any more. Now his back and neck were. And his arm felt halfway decent in this position. Maybe he would make it after all.

He turned, looked at the road, the oil trail. Then he crossed the highway, patted his right jeans pocket, felt the weight of the cell phone. He didn’t remember putting it inside, but it was there, bobbing against his thigh. His security. His link to the outside world. He reached the side road and slipped through the opening in the trees.

The road had once been covered with gravel, but most of it had worn away with time and traffic. He suspected this had been a logging road. Once the trees were cleared, no one used it any more.

There were weeds in the middle of the path, bent and broken by the passage of at least one vehicle. The oil trail coated a few of them, still saying Follow me. Follow me.

He did follow, keeping to the side of the road so that he didn’t disturb the oil trail. He wanted the police to be able to follow it.

He had never been off the main highway. It was quieter here, different, light filtering through the trees, the smell of pine and loam. There was a damp scent, as if the ground never dried completely, a reminder that this part of the state was rainforest in the purest sense of the term.

The road twisted around a second growth tree, tall and stately, towering above him like a beacon. There was a rock in the center of the path—more of a boulder really—and he stopped to inspect it.

Something metal had scraped against it, not once but twice, and there was black goo along the side. More oil. The rock was pointed on one edge. Cars had been this way, driving over the rock, figuring they could clear it.

He wondered if the scrapes had caused damage to one of the car’s underbelly—if what he was taking for an oil leak was something else, something that would really incapacitate a car quicker than the drip-drip-drip of the oil pan.

That was when he realized he needed a plan.

He couldn’t go in, guns blazing. He couldn’t attack even if he had both arms. He was a middle-aged man, about thirty pounds overweight and out of shape, a man who spent the last twenty years sitting on his ass, typing comfortably, making up adventures that he had never—could never—experience. He’d fought as a boy, but only defensively, arms up as the school bullies pounded him for their own perverse joy.

He’d won one of those fights, kicking, jabbing, connecting accidentally, fighting dirty, giving up fighting fair. No one fought fair and won.

No one.

He’d have to grab her, bring her back down this trail, and they’d be after him. They’d have their cars, and their guns, and their confidence, and he’d have a broken arm and a little girl who was scared out of her mind.

He stopped at the next corner. He had no idea how far he’d gone. All he saw up ahead was dappled sunlight and more trees. Something rustled in the grass near him—a small sound. A bird, maybe, or a squirrel. Nothing threatening.

Something was different.

It took him a moment to figure out what it was. Stumps. Stumps, buried in the underbrush, moss and ferns growing on top of the old, perfect cuts. Stumps everywhere, and beside them, willowy trees at least twenty years old.

He had been right. This was an old logging road, unused since the early eighties, gravel gone to storms and rain and trucks that once combed this land. Forgotten by everyone except the handful of people who’d worked it.

He felt a thin excitement. The road would only go as far as the stumps. The loggers had no reason to go deeper into the forest than that. Now he had a destination. The end of the road. He’d go to the end of the road and turn around.

Sobel rounded a corner and saw the cars.

Three cars—the two that had boxed him in and one other—a black SUV, new, and parked to the side.

The getaway car.

Why hadn’t they left yet? What were they waiting for? His stomach churned. What if the third car wasn’t a getaway car at all, but belonged to someone else—reinforcements, someone as tough as the others?

He didn’t see anyone near the cars, but they had to be somewhere. He took one more step forward and then saw the cabin. That word was too grand for the dilapidated building, but he didn’t know what else to call it. Shack implied something smaller. This had once been someone’s home, but it had fallen into disrepair. The roof was half off, the porch was crooked, and the stairs leading up to it were missing.

Sarah had to be inside.

He needed to get to her, but first he had to make sure their rescuers could find them.

He backed down the road quietly, going around the corner, praying that no one had seen him. His arm throbbed; he could feel his heartbeat echo in the wound.

He went halfway down, near the beginning of the stumps, where he believed no one could hear him, and pulled out his cell phone, flipping it open.

The line to the left of the tiny screen, the line which showed him how good the reception was, was barely visible. Great. He’d have to go down to the highway to get good reception—and that would be a waste of time, not to mention a serious drain on his energy.

He dialed 911 anyway, hoping he’d get through, wondering if the new dispatch knew about him as well. If he didn’t get through, he’d go down to the road, but he’d risk it here, now, and then he’d go back to the cars.

By then, he’d have a plan.

“Nine-one-one,” a female voice said, and then got lost in static.

He identified himself, hoping she could hear him, hoping she knew who he was and what his situation was. He should have left the line open, but he hadn’t wanted voices to come through, hadn’t wanted any unusual noise as he hurried through the trees.

A voice mingled in the static, something about staying by the car. Good. She knew who he was then, knew what he was about.

He told her, quickly and as quietly as he dared, about going up the logging road and finding the building and the cars.

“Excellent.” Suddenly her voice was as clear as if she were beside him. “Now return to the highway, Mr. Sobel. Our officers are nearly there.”

“No,” he said. “I haven’t seen Sarah yet. I have to find her.”

“Let us do that, Mr. Sobel. You could get —” Her voice disappeared in a crackle of static, and he used that moment to sever the connection. He dropped the phone back in his pocket and felt it bump against the fabric, slamming against his thigh like the Swiss Army knife had earlier.

His breath caught in his throat as the plan came to him. He reached across, fumbling in his left pocket with his right hand, cursing softly as his forearm knocked against the sling, jostling it.

At least the pain had eased. Keeping the arm elevated made it less of a liability.

His fingers found his Swiss Army knife and pulled it out of his pocket. He did owe this moment to Jackson Ross and mentally he saluted his character. Since Sobel had come up with Ross, he’d carried a Swiss Army knife.

 A man has to be prepared for anything, he used to say.

He pushed open the blade, and looked at it. Shiny with lack of use, it looked sharp and impressive.

The bird had stopped twittering. He wondered if that meant it had noticed him or it had seen someone else.

As he rounded the now-familiar corner, he let out the breath he hadn’t known he’d been holding. No one was around. He couldn’t even hear voices from inside the building.

For the first time, he wondered what they were doing in there. Waiting until the search had moved on—to Grand Ronde or McMinnville or maybe even Portland. If he hadn’t seen that oil trail, he would have thought that they had driven Sarah out of the Coastal Mountain Range.

But why stay here? How long would they wait? Wouldn’t the police continue searching for them?

Then he remembered how shorthanded the county was. Even if the state police brought personnel to help, they wouldn’t be enough to cover every square inch. And even if they were on the ball, they wouldn’t be stopping SUVs. They’d be looking for the cars that Sobel had described, hoping to find one with a little terrified girl inside.

If they waited, they would be less suspicious. Their getaway would be much easier.

His grip tightened on the knife. So close to disaster. One oil trail away from losing Sarah forever.

He made himself go slow. This much he’d learned from all his novel research: the man who panicked—the man who felt he had to do everything quickly—was the man who died.

Sobel moved to the SUV first. Its wheels were large and state-of-the-art. It would take all the strength he had to damage them. To hedge his bet, he hunkered down beside the wheel farthest from the cabin and opened the air pressure valve. He threw the cap into the weeds. Then he gripped the knife in his good hand and jammed it into the tire.

It felt good to slam the knife repeatedly into something—a way of working off the adrenaline, the pent-up anger and frustration, the fear buried beneath all the bravado.

When that tire was sufficiently ruined, he did the same thing to the front tire, amazed that no one had come out of the cabin to investigate the chunk-chunk-chunking sounds he was making. Maybe they couldn’t hear them. He couldn’t hear any conversation from the cabin. They probably couldn’t hear much outside.

Bits of galvanized rubber hung off the blade of his knife. He glanced at the other cars. He had to destroy their tires too, but he wasn’t sure doing the wheels would be enough. He had to make certain that no one got away from this cabin. It was the only thing—the best thing—he could do.

He slid under the SUV, wincing as the movement tugged his flannel shirt tighter around his shoulders. The makeshift sling fell sideways, and he banged his arm against the ground. The pain made him whimper—an involuntary sound that he would have taken back if he could. He lay still for a moment, feeling the damn dizziness return.

He made himself exhale, then inhale. Slowly. Measuredly. Trying to control each breath, and get rid of the dizziness. After a moment, it passed. He found himself looking up at tubes and wires and pipes—most of which he had no idea what they were to or from.

So he cut the tubes and stabbed a hole in the flimsiest of the pipes—the last thing he wanted to do was break off his blade. Fluid dribbled out of one of the tubes. Then he severed a few wires and froze as a thought hit him.

What if one of the wires went to a security system?

His hand stilled near the underbelly of the SUV. Well, if it did, he hadn’t hit it yet. And who set the security alarm on a car parked in the middle of nowhere? Paranoid businessmen, maybe, but certainly not crooks.

As if he knew this for a fact. The only crooks he’d ever known were the ones he’d read about or the ones he’d conjured in his imagination. These were not imaginary crooks. These were people who had shot his car all to hell, shoved him over an embankment, and then kicked him to see if he was dead.

They were all too real. And all too ruthless.

With his feet, he eased himself out from under the SUV. He disabled the other two cars, always working on the side of the cars that hid him from the cabin itself, careful when he slid underneath not to whack his arm again.

When he finished, he felt as if he had run a marathon. He was dripping with sweat, covered in some kind of noxious goo from one of the tubes, and he ached all over. Still no cops. He wondered if they were having trouble finding him or if he had lost all track of time.

He needed to get back to the road, to tell them where Sarah was, and to have them get her free. He was in no shape for it. He knew that now. But he couldn’t quite bring himself to leave. He had to look inside the cabin.

If she was dead—if she even looked dead—he would launch himself inside that building and used his knife to carve up whomever he saw.

The anger propelled him forward.

He stayed to the side of the dirt driveway. It sloped downhill. The back of the cabin was a mess of ruined furniture, rotted firewood, and non-compostable trash—plastic milk containers, beer bottles, and the remains of plastic garbage bags. He avoided the piles, knowing if he knocked anything over, someone would come for him.

Then he eased around the side of the cabin.

Overgrown rhododendrons covered the closest window. Calla lilies the size of children lined this side of the building. There was no way for him to get close without going on the porch.

He wasn’t willing to do that.

He crossed behind the cabin again, hoping the other side was less overgrown. It wasn’t. This side had hydrangeas and some weird evergreen plant that used to be popular as decoration around houses in the 1960s.

The porch was his only option. The wood was rotted on this side, and the railing had long ago fallen away. He wondered if it would even hold his weight. He crouched down, testing it, and felt the soft, spongy wood move.

It would be a risk. But he had to try.

He eased himself onto the soft wood, careful to keep his head down. The wood groaned. He froze and the wind—a wind he hadn’t noticed until now—swirled around him. He thought it carried voices.

Maybe he was finally close enough to hear. No doors opened, though, and no one came for him.

Slowly, he raised his good hand and touched the windowsill. It was slimy beneath his fingers. Slimy and ruined. He doubted it would take any pressure at all.

He moved his hand to the side of the building, then braced himself and leaned upward. The rotted porch shifted beneath him, groaning again, and he felt his bad arm ache. If he slipped, he’d fall toward his left side and he wouldn’t be able to catch himself.

He would be trapped by his own pain, unable to rise, a perfect victim for the men inside.

Still, the compulsion to see if Sarah was alive was greater than any disaster scenario his fertile brain could come up with. He dug his shoes into the building’s side and got just enough leverage to raise himself up.

The window was covered on the outside with old dirt and cobwebs. He could just barely peer inside. The men were sitting around a table. Two of them were playing cards. The third was holding Sarah.

She had one tiny arm around his neck, and she was chattering like she always did. Then, as Sobel watched, she flung her head back and laughed.

This was not a terrified child. This was a child completely comfortable with the people around her.

And Sarah hated strangers.

At that moment, his foot slipped. He lost his leverage, his weight landing firmly on the rotted porch. The wood bounced beneath him, and for a minute, he thought it would break off. But with that rubbery movement common to ruined wood, it simply rocked for a minute before easing to a stop.

His heart was pounding so loud, he wondered if the men inside could hear it. His breathing was short and ragged and he didn’t want to slip off the porch for fear he’d fall and lose whatever advantage he had.

The best thing he could do now was go back to the road, and direct the sheriff up here. Sobel had disabled the cars; no one was going anywhere.

He only wished he could get Sarah free. If he had the ability to turn into Jackson Ross for just five minutes, he would. He would go in, get her out, and be down the hill with her before her captors—if indeed that was the accurate term for them—knew she was gone.

But he couldn’t, except in his own imagination, and at this moment, his imagination was a liability.

So he carefully slid off the porch. The wood rocked and groaned behind him, but he tried to ignore it as he moved forward, hugging the side of the building as best as he could go.

As he went around the mound of garbage, he heard a twig snap. He froze. Something moved beside him, and then there was a gun in his face.

Not just one gun, but half a dozen guns. The sheriff and his deputies, their brown uniforms blending with the woods, stood in the driveway, all their weapons pointed at him.

So the calvary had finally arrived.

Staring down the barrel of a gun, held by a macho grim-faced boy barely old enough to vote, was a lot more unnerving than Sobel ever thought it would be.

He took a deep breath and hoped he would be able to sound a lot calmer than he felt. “I’m Max Sobel. I’m the one who called this in.”

Still the boy deputy with the big gun didn’t move. One of the other deputies did, approaching slowly, his gun up, always keeping Sobel’s hands in sight.

The second deputy reached him in a matter of seconds, reached into his pockets, and pulled out both the cell phone and the knife. His gaze met Sobel’s. The man’s eyes were blue, direct, and emotionless.

Sobel said, “Sarah’s inside the cabin. She doesn’t look injured. They’re holding her. She seems to know them.”

The sheriff, an older man Sobel had seen around town, said, “Bring him.”

The deputy took Sobel’s good arm and pulled him forward. The other deputy kept the gun trained on him. The rest of the group disappeared into the trees.

Sobel half walked, half stumbled with the deputy. They went down the road, past the corner. The sheriff was standing there. He was a beefy man, but most of the beef came from muscle, not flab. He had the square-jawed look of confidence most real cops had. The deputies formed a triangle behind him, like a team ready to charge if anything went wrong.

“I’m not going to yell at you,” the sheriff said tightly, “even though you’re being an absolute ass. You know how most civilians get killed in police actions? By interfering. By thinking they can be a hero. Looks like you got a hero complex, Sobel.”

Sobel felt his cheeks flush. “You would never have found her, never have found this road.”

“We haven’t done anything yet. Right now, I’m going to be short one man because he’s going to stay here and make sure you don’t do anything stupid.”

The sheriff started up the road.

“Wait,” Sobel said. “I got to see in that cabin. I know where everyone is.”

The sheriff stopped. He seemed to be considering Sobel’s words.

“Please,” Sobel said. “You can yell at me later for everything I did wrong, but use my information. For Sarah’s sake.”

The sheriff turned. His dark eyes sparkled with anger. “Make it quick.”

Sobel described the interior, the way that they were holding Sarah, the fact that two of them were playing cards. “It looks to me like they’re waiting for something, or someone, or a time.”

The sheriff grunted, not agreeing or disagreeing.

“And you should probably know that I disabled their cars.”

The sheriff’s eyebrows rose a little, displaying surprise.

“I destroyed two tires on each and cut up lines underneath. Even if they get out of that cabin, they’re not going to get off this road—by car anyway.”

The sheriff studied Sobel for a moment, then nodded. With his right hand, he signaled his men to follow. All of them went except the deputy who had Sobel by the arm.

“Can we at least watch?” Sobel asked. “I want to know if Sarah’s going to be all right.”

“No,” the deputy said. “We’re going back to the highway.”

Somehow Sobel had known that would be the response, but he had hoped. The deputy led him down the dirt road. Sobel was dizzy again, and did everything he could to remain upright. He didn’t want them to know how much this was taking out of him—how much it had taken out of him.

They were almost to the highway when he heard the first gunshot, followed by half a dozen others.

He yanked his good arm free, started back up the road, and the deputy tackled him. Sobel landed on his bad arm—the pain blinding, knocking his breath away, knocking out everything except a sensation that was at once cold and white hot and electrifying.

By the time he could move again, the shooting had stopped.

This was why they had wanted him away from it all. He had been the wild card, the unpredictable factor, the thing they couldn’t control.

Him and Sarah.

The deputy had rolled off him. “You all right, Mr. Sobel?”

No. Of course he wasn’t all right. He was lying on his stomach on a dirt path. Up ahead, there had been gunfire, right near a little girl he loved more than he’d ever realized.

“Sarah,” he said.

And to his credit, the deputy did not offer a single platitude. Instead he said, “Let’s get you down to the ambulance,” as if nothing had gone wrong.

***

The wait was interminable. Sobel was sitting on the edge of the ambulance’s back doors where he had a good view of the highway and that awful dirt road.

He had refused to go inside the ambulance. The paramedics had poked and prodded him out here, declaring his arm broken (what a surprise) and his body in a state of shock.

Around him were police cars, not just the state cars but some black county cars, and one marked McMinnville Police. An off-duty office had heard about this on his police scanner as he drove through the corridor and pulled over to help.

Apparently, Sobel’s eyes weren’t as good as they used to be either. He had thought the officers were wearing the same uniform, but they weren’t. They had all come together to help him and Sarah.

Sarah. His mind skittered over her name, mixing the sound of it with the sound of gunshots, the way his arm cracked when he fell on it the final time, the silence when the firing ended. Maybe he should have gone for her, advice be damned. Maybe, if he had, she would be all right. It worried him that no one had come out of those trees.

It worried him that he hadn’t heard any more shooting either. And no cars starting—no one trying to drive away on ruined tires. He kept staring at the opening in the trees, hoping—maybe even praying—that he would see Sarah come through it. Sarah, safe and protected, and alive.

When the trees did shudder, he thought he was imagining it. When a deputy stepped out, Sarah in his arms, Sobel thought he was imagining that too.

Until he realized that Sarah’s tiny face was scratched and dirty, that she was crying hard, and that her small hands were braced on the officer’s shoulders, trying to push away. Like she always did with strangers.

She was alive and she was safe.

“Sarah!” he called, jumping off the back of the ambulance. He tottered forward, the paramedics yelling at him, and Sarah, sweet Sarah, turned her beautiful face toward his and screamed, “Max!”

She extended her pudgy arms and twisted in the officer’s grasp so that he was holding a whirling, determined three-year-old, one who wasn’t going to be denied. Sobel reached her as she launched herself toward him. She slammed against his broken arm and he staggered backwards. It took all of his concentration to keep from whiting out again, to keep his good arm wrapped around her.

She smelled of dirt and child-sweat and urine. Her pants were cold and wet, and her shirt—the one he’d put on her that morning, her Pooh shirt, which she loved—was ripped and stained. She buried her face against his neck and sobbed, deep heart-wrenching sobs, the kind he’d never heard her make in the year that he’d been involved with her mother.

He scooted her up, placing his good arm more tightly around her. The movement jostled his bad arm and he had to grit his teeth as he hurried toward the ambulance.

One of the paramedics, a woman with dirty blond hair and a too-thin face, tried to take Sarah from him, but the little girl tightened her grip on Sobel’s neck.

“It’s all right,” he said. “I’ll be right here.”

But Sarah didn’t seem to care. He wasn’t even sure she heard him, the way she cried, her entire body shaking with the intensity of her sobs.

He glanced at the paramedic in supplication. The woman put one slim hand on Sarah’s back, as if she could absorb all of that pain through her fingers.

Finally, Sarah took a deep, shuddering breath, and raised her head. “Max,” she said and touched his face with begrimed fingers. There was something in her eyes, something older than he’d ever seen, and it made him want to cry. If he could, he’d use all the powers of his imagination to remove that look from her face. He knew he would be haunted by it for the rest of his life.

“I’m going to hand you to this lady,” he said. “She’s a doctor. She’s going to make sure you’re all right. I’ll be here the whole time, holding your hand.”

Sarah’s face scrunched up and he thought she was going to burst into tears again. But her grip on his neck loosened, and he was able to ease her into the paramedic’s arms.

“Do you have extra clothes for her?” the woman asked as soon as she touched Sarah’s wet pants.

“In the car,” he said, “but I’m not going to get them. I said I’d stay here.”

The woman nodded. She told one of the other paramedics to get the clothes, then she set Sarah on a bunk. Sobel had to struggle to get into the back of the van to be beside her.

Sarah didn’t complain as the woman checked her over. Sobel watched intently, seeing only scratches and the occasional bruise on Sarah’s arm. They hadn’t had her long enough to do permanent damage—or so he hoped.

As the woman worked, methodically checking Sarah’s eyes, her mouth, her scalp, voices echoed in the road behind them. Sobel stiffened, but the paramedic smiled at him.

“They’re ours,” she said softly.

“They shooted Craig, Max.” Sarah’s voice was reed-thin.

The paramedic looked up from her work. Sobel felt stunned, but he kept his voice even. “Who’s Craig, honey?”

“Mommy’s boyfriend. He’s not as nice as you.”

Max felt cold. It was a physical condition, he told himself. The shock. Nothing more. “I thought I was your mommy’s boyfriend.”

Sarah gave him a sad look. “No, silly. You’re Mommy’s finance.”

She’d always said fiancée wrong. He’d thought it cute that a little girl would even bother to learn the term. Now he was beginning to understand why.

“You never told me about Craig,” he said.

“Mommy said not to say nothing. She said you didn’t like Craig. She said he made you mad.”

Damn right it made him mad. It was making him mad now, though he struggled not to show it.

“Did Craig hurt you?” he asked softly.

Sarah’s lips got thin. “He held me too tight. He put his hand over my mouth when the men with guns came. It hurt.”

Those were bruises near her nose and mouth. He had thought it was dirt.

“She was kicking him when we got there.” The voice came from behind Sobel. “Her face was turning blue. He was cutting off her air.”

Sobel turned. The sheriff stood there. He looked smaller than he had in the woods, shoulders slumped, eyes weary.

“We sent one of our men in and got her out.”

“It hurt, Max.” Sarah’s voice hitched.

“Where did it hurt?” the paramedic asked.

But Sarah’s gaze hadn’t left his. She was making it clear she wasn’t going to talk to anyone but him. “Where did it hurt, honey?”

She touched her mouth, her nose, then closed her eyes against it all.

“Is the little girl all right?” the sheriff asked.

“Badly bruised,” the paramedic said. “We’ll take her in, let her stay overnight. I think Mr. Sobel’s hurt worse, but he won’t let me help.”

They were talking as if he weren’t there. He kept his hand in Sarah’s. She was trembling ever so slightly.

Then he turned slightly so that he could see the sheriff. Deputies were coming off the road. One was holding his arm. Another sat beneath the hill, put his face in his hands, and shuddered. It looked like he was sobbing.

“We’ve got a mess in the trees,” the sheriff said.

“Do we need to go up there?” the paramedic said.

“Not right away.” The sheriff’s voice was flat.

“Any of them our guys?”

“No.”

Sobel looked at the sheriff. “Sarah was out of there before it happened, I trust.”

The sheriff shook his head. “We got her out as fast as we could, but everything came apart rapidly. I don’t know what she saw.”

Sobel glanced at Sarah. Her eyes were still closed, the lashes moving slightly as if she had fallen asleep and was dreaming. Her breath seemed to be coming evenly. “She knew the man.”

“I heard.” The sheriff’s gaze met his. This time, there seemed to be some respect in it. “You’re Maxwell Sobel the writer, right?”

“Yeah.” Sobel suddenly felt wary.

“You rich?”

Sobel paused for a moment. That was a question he usually hated to answer. It wasn’t about the money, he would say. It’s about the writing.

Only this time it probably was about the money.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m rich.”

“They had guns. They didn’t shoot you. They took the girl and went up there to wait. She’s your girlfriend’s daughter?”

For an odd, giddy moment, Sobel wanted to correct him. My finance’s daughter. “We’re engaged. When she got back from New York, I was going to sign the papers to adopt Sarah.”

“Was?”

“If you’re suggesting what I think you’re suggesting, some of my plans are going to change.” He was being deliberately vague in case Sarah was still awake. Strange, he wasn’t thinking so much about JoAnn. He was thinking about Sarah, about the way he’d finally learned there was more to life that books and words and imagination.

How he’d had to see her before he left that cabin—jeopardize everything, his life, his future—just to make sure she was still alive.

“You got an answering machine, Mr. Sobel?”

“Yeah.”

“One that plays back messages no matter where you are?”

Sobel felt cold. “Yeah.”

“Let’s call it.”

Sobel hesitated for a moment. Sarah’s hand was lax in his. He put her small fingers across her chest, then reached into his pocket and grabbed his cell phone. He flipped it open, dialed, then pressed the necessary code to get the messages.

Three stored—he’d already heard those the day before: two from his agent on some foreign sales; one from JoAnn declaring her undying love. He was glad he didn’t have to listen to that one again.

Then there were four new. The friend who’d babysat for him in Portland saying Sarah had left behind one of her books; two from the police, trying to see if anyone else was there—maybe even trying to see if his 911 calls had been pranks—and one with a filtered electronic voice:

Max Sobel, we have what you lost. If you’d like it returned, it will be expensive. We will call again with instructions.

“Well?” the sheriff asked. This time, Sobel thought he saw compassion in the sheriff’s face.

Sobel handed him the phone, explained how to replay the last message, and watched the sheriff as he listened. His expression didn’t change at all.

He flipped the phone closed and handed it back to Sobel. “You think your girlfriend’s involved?”

The calls all through her trip, ostensibly lovey, keeping him up to date on her shopping. Usually when they were apart, they spoke once a day. When he left for Portland, it seemed they were speaking once an hour.

He’d told her when he and Sarah were heading home. He’d spoken to her as the car crossed the Burnside Bridge, Sarah giggling at something in the backseat.

He’d told her. And then she’d called them.

Why would she do this when she could have married him? But he knew the answer to that, too. The prenup had been restrictive, and he had told her, early on, that she’d be on an allowance. He’d provide, yes, but there’d be no access.

No control.

A ransom—one she was sure he’d pay—would bring in what she needed.

“Mr. Sobel?”

“She knew where we’d be,” he said, amazed such a broken voice could come out of him. “She knew exactly where we’d be.”

Two deputies led a man off the side road. His hands were cuffed behind his back, his shirt smeared with blood. His hair hung in a stringy mat over his face, but it was clear he was one of the card players.

Sobel dropped Sarah’s hand. He slid off the end of the ambulance, but there must have been something in his eyes because the sheriff gripped him by his good shoulder.

“Let us take care of this,” the sheriff said.

“He tried to kill Sarah.”

“We have him.”

But that wasn’t enough for Sobel. He started across the highway. The sheriff held onto him, tight.

“We need him, Sobel. To testify against your girlfriend, and everything she’s done to that poor little girl.”

Sobel let himself be stopped. Sarah. He hadn’t thought about Sarah and what this would mean. “What’ll happen to Sarah?”

“You said you got adoption papers,” the sheriff said. “Better sign ’em, maybe the same time as when you go home to let us know where we can find that girlfriend of yours.”

“I’ll call her for you,” Sobel said. “She’s probably waiting to hear from this Craig anyway.”

“Well, she won’t.”

One of the deputies grabbed the prisoner by the head, and shoved him into the back of a squad car. The other deputy was still sitting by the side of the road, shaking. The male paramedic was tending to the third deputy, Sarah’s change of clothes on the road beside him.

“What happened up there?” Sobel asked.

The sheriff shook his head and his eyes grew dark. “Went in, standard two-two formation, going for the girl. Got her—harder than you’d think, Sobel, it was us she was scared of—and the jerk holding her shot my man.”

Sobel remembered the first shot, then the others in rapid succession. Sarah. No wonder she looked so old now.

“Brigs, there, he grabbed her and ran, like he was supposed to, shielding her with his back, and we opened up. That one there, he went for the car. Would’ve got away too, if it weren’t for you.”

Sobel could picture it, all of it, the way the bodies moved in Sam-Peckinpaw slow motion, the blood spurting, the holes appearing in that ruined wood wall. Sarah, too frightened to scream, wanting someone familiar, wanting anyone except the uniformed man carrying her down the hill.

Those adoption papers were everything. JoAnn’s miscalculation. She hadn’t expected to get caught until she had Sarah back, until her companions had collected Sobel’s cash, and they were all far away.

Now the trip to New York made sense. Everything, the little looks, the biting comments made since the prenup, all made sense.

“For what it’s worth,” the sheriff said, “I don’t recommend what you did. But we wouldn’t have gotten that little girl back without you.”

Sobel looked at him, feeling old and tired and not victorious at all. He had never thought about the messes, the way life changed in a heartbeat—gunshots fired at a car, a man falling down an embankment, a woman betraying everything for too much green.

“I have to get back to Sarah,” he said.

Jackson Ross wouldn’t have said that. Jackson Ross would have been on the next plane, tracking down JoAnn himself. But Jackson Ross was a fictional construct, designed with an outmoded sense of macho by a man who only survived one schoolyard fight.

Jackson Ross wasn’t real.

Sarah was.

Sobel climbed back into the ambulance and sat beside the stretcher, taking Sarah’s hand in his own. She sighed and turned toward him. Her now-clean face bore bruises in the shape of a man’s fingers, her skin was scraped from a run in the trees, her mind was forever filled by the terrifying images of good guys with guns.

He had gotten it wrong because real life wasn’t entertaining and it didn’t play. And people lived with the consequences.

Forever.

Heroics

Copyright © by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and Layout copyright © by WMG Publishing
Cover design by WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © Nivers/Source

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

Any use of this publication to train generative artificial intelligence (“AI”) technologies is expressly prohibited. The author and publisher reserve all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

]]> https://kriswrites.com/2026/09/07/free-fiction-monday-heroics/feed/ 0 37929 https://kriswrites.com/2026/09/05/the-golden-valley-homecoming-kings/ https://kriswrites.com/2026/09/05/the-golden-valley-homecoming-kings/#respond Sat, 05 Sep 2026 15:04:31 +0000 https://kriswrites.com/?p=37924 Sometimes I have no idea where stories come from. They just evolve.

Annie Reed and Dave Hendrickson asked me to participate in their Romance For All Seasons anthology subtitled Festive Fall. They asked for something that would suggest fall and told me that it was okay to include magic in the story.

Well, my brain came up with a combination of magic, the Breakfast Club, and two unlikely couples. Oh, and nearly 100 Homecoming kings. Yes, you read that right.

You can pick up the story and this wonderful anthology, filled with great writers, by clicking here.

I put them in a made-up part of the coast because I used to live there. The towns on the coast are small, and I didn’t want anyone to think that I was writing about them. So I made up my own part of the coast.

The stories I set there range from fantasy to mystery to science fiction. I never tried to organize them before this year. I finally decided to do so, and am using Kickstarter to launch the project.

You see the three novels set in Seavy County here. And there are also four collections—two fantasy collections, one mystery collection, and one science fiction collection.

You can get them all—the three novels and the four collections in the Kickstarter. If we hit our stretch goals, you’ll get one more collection.

So take a look. In addition to these books, you’ll find writing workshops, more fantasy short stories, and three epic fantasy novels.

Click here to see more.

Thanks!

Read a recently published history of 1929. I like the author and his contemporary reportage. He was trying for something with this history book, and he did okay, but I’ve read a lot of histories of that time period and felt he added little new. I think the only insight I took from it might have been unintended. It is rather appalling to me how many bad political decisions have been made at Mar A Lago throughout its lifetime. Mar A Lago was the E.F. Hutton estate in the 1920s, and there were economic summits there. Since you all know about the crash and resulting Depression, you know how well those summits went.

Read some mediocre books by favorite writers, including a spy rom-com that I had apparently started before and quit in the middle. Ironically, I tried to quit in the same spot, remembered that, and powered on. The book was okay, but not worth recommending. It ended up being my late-night reading.

Also read a mystery anthology that I was stunningly unimpressed with. But one story caught my eye. When I looked at it again to recommend it to you all, I couldn’t remember it by title. Then, once I found it, I couldn’t remember it at all, just that I liked it. So there are no mystery shorts here. Guess I wasn’t as impressed as I thought.

Here’s what I did like in July.

July, 2026

Abdurranqib, Hanif, “Introduction,” The Year’s Best Sport’s Writing 2025, edited by Hans Abdurraqib, Triumph, 2025. The introduction (which you can read as a sample) to this volume is worth the price of admission all by itself. A strong essay about writing and sports, and the importance of a writer’s perspective, this piece was a great start to a great volume. I underlined a lot of quotes here, but I think the one I love the most is this:

I tend to think that my favorite writers are writers who seem to create with their back to the audience, which doesn’t come from a place of contempt, but rather, comes from a place of awareness. If one cares too much about the perceived interest of potential readers, you end up catering to a vast nothing, the vastness of no audience at all.

Read this even if you don’t like sports writing.

Akam, Simon, “Precipice of Fear: The Freerider Who Took Skiing to its Limits,” The Year’s Best Sport’s Writing 2025, edited by Hans Abdurraqib, Triumph, 2025. In some ways, this essay is about the acceptance of premature death in certain extreme sports. In other ways, it focuses on the personality types who actually are interested in those sports, sometimes for the high risk factor. Interesting on many levels, particularly with human psychology.

Davis, Zack, “One Must Imagine the Detroit Mechanix Happy,” The Year’s Best Sport’s Writing 2025, edited by Hans Abdurraqib, Triumph, 2025. A wonderful, thoughtful essay on loving teams that are lovable losers—and on being part of those teams. On coaching those teams. Here’s a lovely quote (one of many) from the piece:

Sport, like life, demonstrates that no matter how badly things are going, no matter how much you may lose, you have to get up and try again. Not because you have to, but because you believe you’ll succeed.

The essay deals with this in a lot of ways, the most surprising being the quote from Albert Camus’s “The Myth of Sisyphus.” In fact, the title comes from the final line of that essay, transformed from Sisyphus to the Detroit Mechanix. Worth reading.

Febos, Melissa, “Nothing is Gayer Than My Love For Women’s Basketball,” The Year’s Best Sport’s Writing 2025, edited by Hans Abdurraqib, Triumph, 2025. This essay starts off the book, because Abdurranqib actually put the essays in a reading order like a good editor does, rather than alphabetically by author like a lazy editor does. This essay is very short, and almost serves as the book’s thesis statement because it charms and it provides a strong perspective on sport. I can identify with this quote:

I never saw my idols like this: aggressive and jubilant, unified and yelling, glowing with sweat and self-satisfaction. These players are not just a spectacle of something I find beautiful, they’re proof to that younger self of what is possible.

Wow, do I get that. I was an athletic little girl who was consistently denied the opportunity to play sports once I turned eight or so. Title IX came too late for me. (It wasn’t implemented in my region of the country until I was out of high school…six years after passage.) I sometimes cry during women’s sporting events, because it is such an uplifting and amazing thing to me. So, yeah. I get this. And loved the essay.

Fedarko, Kevin, The Emerald Mile, Scribner, 2013. I discovered this book through a mention in Runner’s World. They listed books about extreme adventures in the Grand Canyon (which isn’t far from where I live) and called this one a classic. Yeah, well, wow. Not only does it have history of the discovery, and a lot of other neat trivia, there is an actual thriller through line. This is the best book I read in July. I was going to piece it out as I often do with nonfiction, and after the beginning, I pulled it into my regular reading spot, and devoured the book in two days. It is a thriller, but because it is also life, the ending kinda sputters. No matter. I might even reread this (which is unusual for me). It truly is a classic.

Gjone, Helen, “The Ballet School,” The Year’s Best Sport’s Writing 2025, edited by Hans Abdurraqib, Triumph, 2025. A heartbreaking essay about the way that some programs in sport, particularly in dance, tear the participant apart rather than help them achieve their best. It’s an old-fashioned attitude that probably has destroyed more people than it ever helped. This piece is from a survivor of an especially harsh program.

Hunt, Nick, “Traveling at the Speed of the Soul,” The Year’s Best Sport’s Writing 2025, edited by Hans Abdurraqib, Triumph, 2025. This essay is more about travel, particularly world travel, than it is about sports. It discusses that discombobulated feeling you sometimes get when traveling, particularly when you lose a lot of hours to time zone changes. I thought about this one for days afterwards, which is always the mark of a good argument.

Idle, Eric, The Spamalot Diaries, Crown, 2024. I bought this charming little hardcover when I attended Spamalot here in Las Vegas in February. Eric Idle kept a diary of the first-run of Spamalot twenty years or so ago, and didn’t think much of it. Then, cleaning his house to downsize, he found the diary and decided to publish it to coincide with the revival. It’s really a fun little book that shows just how difficult putting on a Broadway show can be. I marked it up, even though it’s a first edition (Oh, bad me) because I liked a lot of the quotes. Producer Bill Haber said at the read-through that he had the utmost respect for writers:

They sit in a room with an empty piece of paper and then suddenly all of you people are employed!

Exactly. There are lots of fun tidbits like that. Writers, this is a must read. Theater fans, you’ll like it too. And I don’t have to tell Monty Python fans to get it. They probably already have a copy.

Kelly, Devin, “Stumbling Can Be Lovely,” The Year’s Best Sport’s Writing 2025, edited by Hans Abdurraqib, Triumph, 2025. A piece that follows Zack Davis’s. It has similar themes. In this one, Devin Kelly writes about learning how to ride a bike when he was in his thirties. Stumbling, falling, all those things we do as kids and try to avoid as adults. This is a fun read.

Marshall, Elizabeth Dilts, “Elizabeth Matthews: ASCAP CEO is Women in Music Executive of the Year,” Billboard, April 18, 2026. Wow, I wish book publishing had a woman like Elizabeth Matthews. She pays attention to artists’ rights on all levels. She is working hard to make certain that songwriters (and the rest of us, by extension) are going to survive the copyright landmines that are ahead (and right now) due to AI and corporate greed. This is worth scaling the paywall to read.

Pandit, Niharika, “Imane Khelif: Refusing the Violent Fiction of Binary Gender,” The Year’s Best Sport’s Writing 2025, edited by Hans Abdurraqib, Triumph, 2025. This is a short argument in story form, and it’s worth the read. It discusses the hatred that Imane Khelif, a female boxer of color, received in the Olympics in 2024. Read this one, then read it again. The analysis is worth thinking about.

Rosenberg, Lisa Williamson, “Black Girl, Blue Leotard,” The Year’s Best Sport’s Writing 2025, edited by Hans Abdurraqib, Triumph, 2025. Such a difficult essay to read, because I understand it on a gut level even though I am not Black. But it describes my experience in a lot of spaces where I did not properly fit in. Rosenberg describes her love at age six of ballet, and the way that she, like the girls in Helen Gjone’s essay, were bullied out of that love. Only Rosenberg’s mother put an important and wonderful spin on the situation, one that Rosenberg clearly remembers decades later. My favorite essay in the book for so many reasons…

Score, Lucy, Rock Bottom Girl, Bloom 2023. Whenever I sit down to recommend a Lucy Score book, I am always reminded that she made the totally stupid decision to make her ebooks exclusive on Amazon. I mostly read paper, so I can get her books anywhere, but for you ebook readers, you’re stuck with Amazon. I’ll wager she’s regretting this decision as the AI slop fills Amazon decreasing everyone’s ebook sales. Sigh.

Anyway, I enjoyed the heck out of this book. As always, her books start great and go strong, slow down terribly for the sex scenes (which I have learned to skip because they don’t add anything plotwise) and go on for just a hair too long. I’m ready to be done with the book before she is. But the characters are great and the dialogue witty as hell. Marley moves back to her hometown where, it seems, no one has moved on from high school except her…and in her opinion, she failed at going out into the real world. She learns some lovely life lessons, the (real) high school kids are marvelous, and the hero is a tad too perfect, just like he should be. So this is a fun read.

Silva, Daniel, Ransom, Harper, 2026. I continue to be impressed with the way that Daniel Silva is negotiating the current political insanity. When he started these books in the 1990s, the world was a very different place. His hero, Gabriel Allon, was an artist and part of the Mossad. Silva dealt with U.S. politics and he was far to the right of me. But now we’re much more aligned, because he’s a sane person. I’m not even sure Israel was mentioned in this book. The U.S. was mentioned in passing. Allon is retired, and yet gets roped into a case involving a reliable bad guy, a Russian oligarch. Not the best Silva, but a quick and entertaining read nonetheless. I’m not even sure how to tell you to start this long-running series, because the world has changed so much. But it is worth reading.

The second edition of The Write Attitude is quite different from the first edition, which originally appeared in 2016. I kept some parts of the original book, but much of the material is newer. The new material comes from my Patreon page. Not every post from my Patreon page shows up here, although several do. If you want to see everything, though, head to Patreon and sign up. 

This post is from December of 2025, and is in the third section of  the book. I often do a reset in August for the last part of the year, probably because I was raised in a college professor’s household. The start of school was always the start of the year. So, I figured, this is timely in an odd way.

REST

From 2025

About fifteen years ago, I broke a small bone in my left foot. I was fifty pounds heavier than I am now, and I had decided to start running. We lived on hills, and even though I followed some training program or other, my body simply wasn’t up to putting that much weight on my tiny feet. Or so said the doctor at the ER.

He X-rayed the foot, determined that the bone was in the right place, and said a cast or boot would hurt more than it would help. Then he said that I had to stay off that foot for six weeks. I quizzed him, as I do with doctors. What does “stay off” mean? Is it really six weeks or can I start moving sooner? And so on and so forth.

As I was asking him questions, I could see Dean out of the corner of my eye. He was trying very hard not to laugh.

So when we left (with me trying to negotiate the world with my crutch), I asked him why he found this whole thing funny.

“Oh, I don’t,” he said. “I just think it’s hilarious that you have to stay off that foot.”

“Why?” I asked.

“You can’t sit still. You won’t be able to stay off the foot.” Then he shook his head, smiling, knowing what was coming.

What was coming was an angry me, being told that she’s not capable of doing something. Of course, I can stay off my foot. Of course, I can. I write for a living. I research and read. At the time, I lived on the Oregon Coast where there was barely anything to do on a good day.

Of course, I could stay down.

Well…no. I learned pretty damn fast that I get up every fifteen to twenty minutes, often without thinking about it. I could not sit still for an hour at all. I had to move. I guess I’m like a shark. I need to be in motion.

Even now, as I write this, I am fighting the urge to get out of the chair and get myself another cup of tea. I am not done with the first one, but apparently, my internal timer went off.

All of this is good for my back and my wrists and my body most of the time. I don’t freeze into a position. I don’t have carpal tunnel or other problems despite writing like a fiend since I learned to type at eight years old.

But when it comes to doctor’s orders of stay down, well…how the heck do you do that?

It happened again when I hurt my left knee ten years ago. And I struggled with that doctor too. But I had learned from the first experience. I knew if he gave me a detailed recovery plan, I would follow it. He didn’t have anything written up, although he did tell me if I pushed the knee I would need surgery which I seriously did not want.

I had to “stay off” the knee for sixteen weeks. Since I had injured myself in October, I would be down for the rest of the year. (I injured myself crossing the damn street! Not running, not doing anything strenuous. I complained. He said, Sometimes the warranty wears out. And I said, What?!? Do I have to worry about the other knee? I got it at the same time. Is it under the same kind of warranty?)

He verbally gave me a recovery plan and I dutifully wrote it down, then copied it and handed it to Dean. (Poor Dean; he suffers when I get injured.) Dean was assigned with reminding me to follow the plan, which the poor man had to do weekly if not daily.

I do not rest well. Even when I got the stomach flu while doing 10,000 steps per day, I knew I was really sick when I couldn’t haul my sorry ass out of bed. But as soon as I could, I got up and got my steps. No ramping up.

So, this past March, after a really great February of running, the warranty of the other knee gave out. I recognized the feeling and knew what to do (besides angrily limp my way back to our building). I still had the old recovery plan, and after determining that yes, this was the same song, different verse, I did that.

Dean The Saint went with me as I started back up running, going only a few blocks at a time. He went with me to prevent me from going farther just because I felt good. Because I do that.

The time off was really good for the rest of my body. Ironically, at the same time, my super amazing Pilates instructor, the Great Michelle, had health issues of her own, so there was no Pilates to tempt me either. The downside of that was that by the time she returned, my back was out.

The upside was that all the niggly little aches and pains I’d been nurturing were gone.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I hear you now. Rest is important. I get that. For other people, anyway.

Or that’s how I was ten years ago. Nowadays? Not so much. I had so many things on my plate that it was a relief to let the 10,000 steps per day go. And dammit! I felt better. I recovered enough to run five days per week (cutting back while school started) and go back to Pilates but I just couldn’t push myself to reinstitute the steps every single day.

And I ran faster and my knee healed and I got a lot stronger.

Dammit.

Then in the fall, a mini-crisis, followed by some big changes in the way we do things. Good changes. Changes that let us rest. Not to mention the worst of the crises of the past three years had eased. They weren’t gone entirely, but they’re manageable.

And…I face-planted. So did Dean. I didn’t even want to run, but I did, half-assed, and I gave myself permission to take days off when I was tired.

What I learned was something quite weird.

I’m in great physical shape. I have no trouble running three miles in the morning and going to an intense Pilates class that night. But in November and early December, I had no reserves at all. If I was tired, I stopped.

I had never hit this place before. In the past, if I was tired, I was physically tired, not whatever this other thing was. It wasn’t burnout, because I had no trouble writing. It was and is a mental and emotional fatigue of a kind that I hadn’t experienced.

I likened it to resting after running a marathon. When I told Dean that, he corrected me. He said we had run an ultramarathon. I’m thinking that might even be an underestimate. It might be one of those run-a-marathon-a-day months that some athletes manage (and then some of them do it in the desert. In the summer. Yeah, we didn’t do this voluntarily. They do). But he did like the analogy, and we remind ourselves of it regularly.

So, in mid-November, I gave myself permission to rest. That meant not putting pressure on myself for anything. I started it after I was done with all the big stuff for school (including a super-fun project that we did, performing a modern version of an ancient play). But the class schedule worked out so that I didn’t have to do anything after Thanksgiving.

I moved other deadlines around so that I didn’t have to do them. And for the first time in maybe a decade, I did not set up a monthly exercise calendar. I didn’t want to underestimate my goals. I wanted to avoid goals altogether.

However, I need to exercise, not for my weight but for my mental health and my back which was badly injured in three separate car accidents (all in which I was rear-ended while stopped). If I don’t exercise, I get seriously depressed. If I don’t keep up with Pilates, my back freezes up.

So, necessities, but I had to figure out how to do them without further exhausting myself. It was the goals (and the races, sadly) that caused the stress, not the exercise itself—but that took a while to figure out.

I’ll be doing races in the front half of 2026, but for the first 2 months, only races in the afternoon. I don’t want the pressure of getting up early. It took a while to figure that out too.

I kept writing, but without deadlines. Writing is restful for me when I can get deep into the story—which was hard these past few years, but isn’t now. I’m back to the space where not writing feels bad. Which is…yay!

The deadlines I had were for business items at WMG, and I made sure they weren’t massive. I am gearing up for the new year, and I’m still not 100% recovered. I don’t want to weirdly relapse.

Hence this piece, because it’s as much for me as it is for you all.

I know that I don’t rest well, but I do take health advice just fine. So I spent the morning doing a web search (not an AI search, damn the revised search engines) looking up what I thought I already knew.

Turns out, I never really read (or recalled) anything about rest and recovery when it came to exercise. (Be patient with me: we’ll get to the rest of life by the end of this.)

I have looked up how to rest after a marathon because Dean has done them since we’ve been together. So I would look that up for him. Of course the experts disagree on how to do it, but they do agree that rest and recovery are important.

The main thing they agree on is that for two weeks afterwards, no exercise. Then either a rebuild (written by advisers who are intense, like I am) or more rest (one day per mile, which means a month of rest, not two weeks). The rebuild should be gradual no matter what.

And it’s the gradual that I have ignored in my life, especially when it comes to business and writing.

But, let’s back up a bit, and talk about incorporating rest into everyday life, which is where I truly fall down. And that’s something I never looked up until today.

The experts divide rest into three categories:

1. 1. 1. Full Rest— taking time away from exercise. A day, maybe a week or more, depending on what’s going on. This is where the experts tell you to prioritize sleep, which sounds stupid because we should all prioritize sleep, but it’s hard to sleep well when things are going on.

Sleeping well means (for adults) getting more than seven hours per night. It also means achieving deep restful sleep. If you can’t achieve that, then you need to learn proper sleep habits—which is hard in this world of screens. (The Mayo Clinic has a good list of proper sleep habits on their website.)

Not sleeping well or enough causes all kinds of problems, from losing mental sharpness during the day to an increased risk of injury due to an inability to handle physical tasks well. And then there’s this, from Ohio State University’s medical website in an article titled “Sleep Versus Exercise: Which Takes Priority?”:

Other symptoms include delayed reaction time, decreased memory and concentration, and decreased response of the body’s sympathetic nervous system, which is important for peak performance. All have been associated with poor sleep patterns and affect how athletes train. Chronic sleep deprivation has even been linked to increased rates of heart disease, infections, inflammation and obesity.

We know that full rest is necessary when we’re sick, but most of the experts recommend a full rest day every seven to ten days if you exercise a lot or train. That doesn’t mean you sit on your butt the entire time. Take the dog for a slow walk or meander to a friend’s house. Just don’t do anything strenuous and don’t increase your heart rate too much.

1. 1. 2. Active Recovery—which I first wrote down as active rest. That’s a contradiction in terms and I’m glad I looked it up. Because we’re moving into the recovery phase here. Rest is either to prevent fatigue or to combat extreme exhaustion.

Active recovery is something else entirely. Active recovery takes place in the hours after exercise, which is why after a race sometimes you see the athletes walking or stretching.

UCHealth, which is a network of clinics and hospitals in Colorado, Wyoming, and Nebraska, defines active recovery in an article on their website titled “Rest and recovery are critical for athletes of all ages from students to pros to older adults.” The article says:

During active recovery, athletes should engage in light physical activity that raises the heart rate above a resting rate. But they should avoid the same repetitive movements they performed during training or an event.

In other words, do something different. Don’t overdo. Just have fun.

Active recovery was something I had heard about and incorporated, but I was still stressing by trying to get 10,000 steps (and more during the pandemic). Now, I’m going to have to rethink that. Because the time I took this fall has made me feel a lot better. (Dammit! I hate it when the experts are right.)

1. 1. 3. Long-term Recovery— here’s the one I had never heard of. And this is how UCHealth defines it in the same article:

Long-term recovery involves rest and recovery periods that are built into a seasonal training schedule. It also may include days or weeks of rest and recovery incorporated into an annual athletic program.

Well, that sounds incredibly sensible and somewhat impossible. But I’m a scheduler (as you can tell from above), and the article added something which helped me.

Athletes who follow a seasonal training program may need to adopt a process called periodization, which incorporates pre-scheduled recovery days and even recovery weeks throughout the year. Periodization requires changes in training programs that include modifying workout types, adding cross-training, and changing exercise intensity, time, and distance.

Well, that’s a big honkin’ well duh to me. I just barreled on ahead for years on the exercise and writing and business things, without thinking about planning rest.

And what’s been stopping me from planning my 2026 was the idea of getting back on that treadmill. (Not literally; I’m the person in the YouTube videos who falls off.)

I think this December is the first time I ever planned to just rest if I needed it. I was not commanding myself to do nothing; I was going by feel rather than mentally powering my way through things.

This is pretty straightforward on exercise. I’m going to plan my year now in walking and in running and with Pilates. (My Pilates partner and I are discussing ramping up over the summer, which makes sense when the temps are 110 degrees and we have to stay inside. That might mean reducing the running…hmmmm.)

But I also want to plan the year with writing and with business. Dean and I always do that at the end of December, and I think this year will be no different.

Because of the nightmare few years, we had to go balls to the wall. Now, we can set our own schedule and take our time.

I’m thinking that I do my writing with maybe one day off for other things. The publishing needs a schedule. You can’t run a publishing business without one. But that doesn’t mean we have to do something every single week.

It means there can be breaks between projects.

It depends on what’s happening in-house versus what’s happening on the outside. For example, I’ve decided to use the Free Fiction Mondays on my website to repair all the damage that the bad administration at WMG inflicted on my work.

That means I’ll have to touch each of the stories I put up, all 52 of them. But I don’t have to do so weekly. Right now, I’m preparing all of January. I posted December’s stories around the first.

It’s a matter of being organized.

From the front of the website, it looks like I’m posting every Monday and back when I did this on my own ten years ago, that’s what I did. But not now.

My goal is to work ahead on as much of the publishing stuff as possible, but without panic and without working my tail off to get something done on a last-minute deadline.

The UCHealth article had this observation as well, one that really struck home to me after the past three years.

Training stresses the body in various ways, but it’s far from the only stress athletes face. Work, school, relationships and the busy pace of modern life can all exacerbate stress, which has a cascade of effects on the body. Stay in a stress state long enough, and there are negative impacts on health.

“If you’re exercising and operating in this stressful, high-cortisol state all of the time, you aren’t getting back to the rest and digest state, and your body isn’t able to heal,” said Jessica Yeaton, a physical therapist at UCHealth SportsMed Clinic in Steamboat Springs. “That has implications on injury, illness, strength production – everything.”

So it’s no wonder that in the middle of one of the most stressful periods of my life, as I was getting no more than six hours of sleep, the warranty ran out on my right knee. (Sigh.) It was inevitable that something would hit me. It just found the weakest physical spot at that time.

What have I learned while researching and writing this post? That I need to change habits. I knew that, but I didn’t know how. Now, as a scheduler, I can figure this out. This gives me the same kind of map that the doctor gave me when the warranty ran out on my left knee. I can design the year with an eye to rest and recovery, hitting my exercise, writing, and publishing goals, and not putting myself back into this weird fatigue state that shows me I still (after a month of going slow) have no real reserves.

I’m getting there though.

And rest will definitely be in my plans for 2026. Now if I can just figure out how to write that into my paper calendars…

“Rest” from The Write Attitude

Copyright © Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Published by WMG Publishing

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This ebook, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

Any use of this publication to train generative artificial intelligence (“AI”) technologies is expressly prohibited. The author and publisher reserve all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

]]> https://kriswrites.com/2026/08/19/the-write-attitude-rest/feed/ 4 37331 https://kriswrites.com/2026/08/01/great-fantasy-reading/ https://kriswrites.com/2026/08/01/great-fantasy-reading/#respond Sat, 01 Aug 2026 15:38:43 +0000 https://kriswrites.com/?p=37821 I just curated a Storybundle called The Fantasy Bundle of Bundles. You see, Storybundle is a bundle of ebooks by different writers on a theme. The concept behind this Storybundle is that each writer contribute a bundle of books. My main contribution is the entire Faerie Justice series in a compilation that you will never find anywhere else. My secondary contribution is in collaboration with Dean Wesley Smith. We’ve put together two books from our Collides collection—one is a book of fantasy short stories from our various series, and the other is a collection of otherworldly fantasy tales.

Those are only two of the bundles in this bundle of bundles. You’ll get stories from 12 other writers…or maybe 50 other writers, if you think of all of the contributors to the anthology series you will find here. All of the ebooks are exclusive to this bundle of bundles. You won’t find them anywhere else.

So much reading! Go take a look! Click here to get yours.