Orgonomicon by Boris D. Schleinkofer Read Free Book Online Page A

its head and clattered its incisors in
puzzlement, and the shadows in the room grew deeper. A patter of
rain struck against the open window and the curtain rippled
wave-like in the breeze in slow-motion, and a single raindrop
landed on the boy's nose, but he didn't wake up.
    HfX7qe2179A9 put a claw on the boy's
forehead, tilting the head back so his jaw cracked open and his
breath came through his mouth, but he didn't wake up.
    The moonlight glinted off the silvery surface
of the alien's instrument as HfX7qe2179A9 pushed the wand deep into
the boy's nasal cavity, but he didn't notice. The end of the wand
slid open and a thin silvery hair squirmed out and buried itself in
the mucous membrane, attaching its fine lines and wrapping
splintering sheaths around an available nerve-ending to fuse itself
with the boy's autonomic nervous system, but he didn't wake up.
    Circuitry interfaced with nerve, with
electricity; a charge drawn from the sleeping body would fill the
storage-capacitors in the wand's handle. Too much drawn would leave
behind a mummified non-regenerative, but regular harvests could be
sustained and were for most. The boy began to deflate.
    The shadows deepened further into black until
they split and brilliant points of light shone through. The
outlander's presence had become an invasion upon reality, and local
space was about to accommodate.
    HfX7qe2179A9 could not allow itself to do it.
The boy had done nothing to deserve being gelded; the beauty that
was life could not so easily be snuffed out to burn at half its
brightness—it stopped the wand's cycling and held onto the metallic
branch growing out of the boy's face, letting the charge pulled
from the sleeping child seep back along the circuitry into his
body.
    A cascade of electricity rode the house-mains
powerline, popping transformers down the street in a blazing line
that ended at the boy's home and plunged the neighborhood into the
blackness of prehistory. The wand broke off, leaving behind a
deposited spiderwebbing of silvery threads lining the inside of his
nose, and the boy still slept. Against the sparkling patina of
stars and the line of blazing telephone-poles, the outline of a
large ovoid shape was a deeper black pulsating in the sky.
     
    The boy's eyes flew open, but he kept
perfectly still, in spite of the terrible feeling that something
had almost been taken away from him, something turned off that
should have been left on.
    Trembling, he looked around the too-dark
room, at the curtains blowing in the wind, at the open doorway, at
the little man standing at the foot of his bed. The man was skinny
and moved strangely, and he held a glowing wizard's stick in a hand
that didn't fit it right.
    Jaime wanted to scream then, wanted to cry
out for his parents, but he couldn't bring himself to make a noise.
The man raised his wand and pointed it at him and it changed
colors, turning first green and yellow and then purple and red and
finally spraying omni-colored lights that danced around his head
and made him feel happy.
    The little man, who would never ever hurt
him, was his friend.
    He'd given him a gift.
     
    Jaime's mother was in stasis in the bedroom
above him, lying next to her unconscious husband in the old
double-bed and the liquid-blue night, when something popped in the
air above her.
    She got out of the bed, leaping to her feet
and grabbing a bathrobe, shouting "They're back! Help! Help!" but
instead lay in bed without the rise and fall that would indicate
breath. She tried to shake the sleeping man awake but her hands
passed right through him; her body still did not move. Torn between
finding her son and reviving herself, she stood paralyzed while the
lights rose up around her.
    A tiny man told her to go to sleep and she
did.
     
    There was a boy, and there was the lie. The
boy maintained the lie though it brought him no gain...but that
wasn't true. The gain was a temporary dismantling of the threat
mechanism. It was exactly what HfX7qe2179A9