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And I'm back. The bridesmaids have all been vanquished. I landed late and today I need to get back up to speed at work. I'll try to get the new theme posted tonight.

Ha! Actually, I'm flying out for my niece's wedding, then sort of an impromptu family reunion. It's gonna be a busy four days, and I'm taking the red eye out to boot. In fact, I have to get up in five hours, so I'm off to bed!

Happy Bday+!

Thanks, everybody!

I'm just getting home from work and I'll be getting on an airplane tomorrow morning, so everyone gets a four day break before I post the next theme on Monday. Enjoy this brief rest for your writing hand, and I'll see you all again in a few days.

... Am now ready to vote (kind of a let down, I know, but I gotta keep the reader invested!)

Closure: Yep
Best Character: Haggis
Setting: Haggis (Love the pulp setting)
Plot: Sinitrena (Creepy stuff)
Word Choice: Haggis (again, very pulpy)
Overall: Haggis

Ponch's story offers the most reasons to keep on reading, even though the cliffhangers got on my nerves after a while

But I love cliffhangers! They're so serial-y! In fact, I love cliffhangers so much that I...

But what color socks is Ben wearing? How am I supposed to assemble this life-size mosaic on my living room wall made entirely out of Trix puffs and Fruit Loop rings if I don't have all the pertinent details?!

@Ponch - Haha. Sorry mate. It's not going to happen this time.

+Stu - I'm crushed! Crushed, I say!

So who won what?

You'll have to tune in and watch to find out!

I'm out. Haven't got time to do another entry and the first was shite anyway. There's some good stuff here though. Well done folks.

Don't do it, Stu! Hammer out some quick, pulpy dreck. It will still fit the theme!

[“The Door At The Bottom Of The Ocean” (Part 7)A Dry Rain]

Whew! Time to let my poor pulper have a good rest. I haven't pulped like that since I was young and optimistic and hopeful and stuff!
Also, word count on this last installment? 1,087. Thanks for the extra wiggle room, Baron.

“The Door At The Bottom Of The Ocean” (Part 7)
A Dry Rain

Doctor Lillian Price had been forced to cobble together an outfit from contents of her recovered luggage, the contents of which had been largely ripped to shreds. She was wearing sensible pants, but her fancy flat shoes were more suited to a day at the library. They provided no traction on slippery wood. The stairs leading down into the darkened interior of the ruined yacht were wet with seawater and old blood. She'd almost fallen headlong into the blackness as soon as she placed her foot on the first step. I'd told her to stay above deck while I checked out the interior with my gun and the flashlight I'd taken from the emergency locker of the floatplane bobbing forlornly out in the middle of the inky, murky waters of the sunken volcanic ring of PÃ,,“ Niho. I'd gotten no argument out of her as I descended into the foul-smelling gloom alone.

What I saw down there can't be related, not in any way that would convey the true horror of it. There were no bodies, but draped here and there, across the stove in the galley, over the furniture in the bunkroom, hanging from light fixtures in the hold, I'd seen the haphazardly spilled contents of the missing bodies: precious organs and other assorted pieces, scattered by unfathomable violence, thrown around carelessly, drying and curing in the open air, shown in the yellow beam of the flashlight.

“Did you find anything?” she asked as I staggered up from the lower deck and out into the sunlight and the cool air.

I coughed, pressed my knuckles against my mouth, and choked back vomit. I'd searched every room down there. The crew of this ship was gone. Mostly gone, I mean. Parts of them had been left behind. I clutched the grab rail. The world was spinning slowly around me and I blinked it back into focus.

“Nope,” I wheezed, spitting over the transom and into the sea, trying to get the taste of that stench out of my mouth. “Nobody here but us. They're dead. But… there's no bodies, Lillian. What in the hell happened here? Headhunters? I've never heard of anything like this before. Not even from those nuts over in Borneo. And those freaks are headhunters.”

She exhaled heavily, shuddering. She rubbed her temple, trying to focus. “Let's check the wheelhouse. Maybe there are maps. Or a logbook. Something.”

I bristled. “Let's just get to the damn plane and get back in the air.”

“We have to look, Tommy!” she implored. “We have to!”

I spat over the side again and led the way forward to the boxy structure that was the ship's compact bridge.

The door to the wheelhouse was thick, strong enough to stand up to typhoon winds. It was open, buckled and twisted, hanging from one bent hinge. I tried to imagine the force it would take to batter that door down. A bigger man than me could've thrown his full weight at that thing, running full tilt when he did so, and it wouldn't have budged an inch. There were claw marks here too, like I'd seen all over the rest of the ship.

I went inside first. I didn't want to, but what choice did I have?

This boat wasn't going anywhere; that was obvious. The controls were smashed. The instruments bludgeoned and shredded, smashed into scrap by the same hideous strength that had stove in the door. There was blood too, of course, two great sprays of it, one along the starboard wall, the other across the bridge window, dried and flaking, rusty red-brown. There were no bodies here either. Whatever had done this had carried them off. I suddenly felt very sorry for the witchdoctor I'd had a hand in marooning here a year ago.

Lillian squeezed around me, doing her best not to see the blood. She knelt down on the floor and began feeling around the planks, slender fingers sliding around in the foul slime.

“Bín'dii át'é,” I whispered, forgetting my English for a moment, urging her to leave the mess alone the language of my childhood. “Yówheh!”

She looked up, perplexed. “What did you say?”

“Let's go, Lillian. This place is bad.”

She returned to her search, dismissing me with a contemptuous glare. “I didn't come all this way to leave empty-handed.”

“Your father is dead,” I said firmly, on the verge of dragging her to the plane if I had to.

“Here!” she exclaimed suddenly. “It's here! I need something to pry with. Do you have a knife?”

I handed her my pocketknife. She unfolded the blade and began to pry at the edge of a plank. She worked the edge up, revealing a hidden compartment. Inside was an oilskin packet, tightly wrapped and waterproof. She opened it, pulled out a small, leather bound book and a neatly folded piece of thickish vellum. She wiped her hands on a rag and unfolded the page, revealing a charcoal rubbing. Most of it was old and slightly smudged, but one corner was new. I couldn't guess the meaning of the strange symbols that had been captured on that page, but I'd seen them on the shore outside.

She flipped through the diary, reading softly, translating the weird, crabbed cipher.

“‘The dry rain fell from the black stars, searingly cold and invisible,'” she mumbled, her green eyes scanning the paper vertically, decoding it column by column. “‘The flesh it touched rotted and blackened, soaked with a bloating foulness. The bearers screamed and died. The roof above was not proof against it; only the shadows cast by the strange candles wedged into the cracks of the glyphed pillars could protect us. We dared not move and stood safe in the darkness the flames made. Damp pools formed above the withering grass, glowing and rippling…'” She nodded. “A portion of Gruenwald's record. The right part of it. This is it. We need to go. Help me set fire to boat and then take me back to Toru Marama.”

It sounded like a damn good idea to me, but I had to ask the obvious. “Burn it? All of it?”

“Yes. Torch it. Sink it. We have to leave. Now.”

“What about your dad?”

“He was never my dad.”

Cold wind slammed into my back. I turned towards the transom.

The Iver Johnson had four bullets in the cylinder. I put every one of them into the inhuman face of the slimy, scaly thing climbing over the rear of the boat, reaching for me with long, glistening, webbed fingers.

Happy Wyzday!

At this point, I'll be crushed if we don't have a client and just did it in irc. It's been a long wait, but it sounds like there's finally light at the end of the tunnel.

Thanks, Baron. I needed a few extra words, to be honest. I was in the process of sharpening the editing scissors for tomorrow's posting.

[HAPPY BIRTHDAY APRILSKIES & DANVZARE]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY APRILSKIES!!!!!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY APRILSKIES & DANVZARE

Ditto!

[AN:]

AN: I have a question: how soon after one instalment are we allowed to post the next? Only this is shaping up to be a little longer than I thought and I really want to finish it before the deadline

I'm not the guy running this contest, of course, but I'd guess once every 24 hours would be acceptable? Maybe once every 12 hours if you're really trying to get paid by the word? I'm doing one installment every two days, but that's because I'm old and I need frequent naps.

[“The Door At The Bottom Of The Ocean” (Part 6)The Wreck]

Almost done! And good thing too, my pulper is getting tired!

“The Door At The Bottom Of The Ocean” (Part 6)
The Wreck

The dead water was as smooth as a glass mirror. The cold air was very still. It was eerie. No whales or fish could be seen in the cloudy depths around this rock. No birds rested on the jagged shore. It was as though every creature in the world had enough sense to avoid this place. Except us, of course.

I had dropped the plane's small anchor, which would keep it from drifting too much while we were gone, and I was paddling us towards the shore with one oar, Indian style, in the small, flat-bottomed aluminum boat normally stowed against the plane's belly, between the pontoon struts.

The wrecked ship was a motor yacht, a sixty-footer, I figured. It had run around on those sharp rocks, ripped to hell, and not just at the water line. Something other than the local jagged obsidian had damaged that ship. Parts of the gunwales and the deck had been gouged by something I couldn't even guess at. Axes or machetes hadn't made those wounds in the wood. It looked almost as though a shark had sank its teeth repeatedly into the sides and top of the boat.

I was grateful that before we'd left, I'd bothered to find my Iver Johnson .45. I wish I'd been able to find more than four bullets for it. I made a mental note to pick up a box of ammo for it the next time I was in Pap'ete. Assuming I made it out of here in one piece, of course.

This tiny islet was the most solitude that could be found in this world, if you asked me. More than a thousand miles away from my hammock at Toru Marama. If anything went wrong, nobody would ever find us.

How drunk did Corrigan have to be to make that trip out here last year, with nobody for company except a half-dead, trussed up witchdoctor stuffed behind the seats, where we usually kept the mail. I'd helped load the poor bastard into the plane. Ikale's shaman had painted the doomed man with all sorts of weird symbols. I'd never seen anything like them at the time. But now I was suddenly seeing them again.

The weird, broken columns jutting up from the volcanic glass had strange markings on them, just like those I'd seen on the witchdoctor. The symbols didn't look chiseled or gouged, but more like they'd always been a part of the rock since it cooled from the volcano that had spewed it out who knows how many centuries ago.

“What the hell's up with those columns?” I asked, working the oar with noticeably less enthusiasm now.

“Stele,” Lillian corrected, studying the approaching shoreline, green eyes squinting against the harsh, reflected rays of the sun. “Columns are architecture. Steles are monuments.”

“Whatever they are, what are they doing out here? I didn't think any of the islanders ever set up shop on this place. Bad juju or something.”

“This place is too remote and too small,” she replied. “People couldn't live here for any length of time. No grass. No crops. It was probably a religious site for them, or something along those lines, I'd imagine.”

“Ikale never said anything about it. He said PÃ,,“ Niho was cursed. Older than the waters. The place where misfortune was birthed. Stuff like that. He said he wouldn't come out here for any reason. Not even to save his own children, if it came to that.”

“Yet he sent his would-be assassin out here to be left for dead,” she countered.

“Worse curse he could put on the man,” I answered, remembering Chief Ikale's words to Corrigan and me as he convinced us to take the job. “Watching the moon rise over PÃ,,“ Niho is ‘a doom worse than any death.' That's what he said.”

“Then let's be gone before nightfall,” she said dryly.

“Good idea.”

The aluminum of the boat scraped against the submerged rocks. We had arrived. We stepped out onto the glossy black shore of PÃ,,“ Niho.

“What the hell was your dad looking for out here?” I asked, keeping my voice low. Dread was clawing at me. The wind was silent, saying nothing.

“While he was still a student, my father did some important work for Harold Copeland, the famous traveler and author.”

“Never heard of him,” I shrugged, picking my way cautiously across the uneven shoreline. I preferred The Shadow or Doc Savage when it came to light reading.

“He wrote Prehistory in the Pacific: A Preliminary Investigation with References to the Myth-Patterns of Southeast Asia,” she answered. From her tone, it was clear that she knew I wouldn't have read it. “He also wrote The Ponape Figurine. That was the one my father assisted him with.”

“Ponape?” I asked. It was a familiar name, part of the Caroline Islands, northwest of the Marivellas. “Like the island?”

“Yes,” she answered, watching worriedly as I levered myself up and over the side of the wreck, onto the angled deck.

There were spent shell casings on the deck, twinkling at the bottom of a shallow pool of fetid water that had collected along the tilted basin of the gunwale. There was blood on the deck too, splotches and streaks of it, sprays too, all of it dried in the sun. There were no corpses to be seen.

The revolver was a comforting presence in my back pocket; I only wished I'd had more bullets for it.

“Help me aboard,” she called, reaching up for me from the black rocks below.

“Probably safer if you stay down there,” I said, resting one boot on the edge of the boat, trying to look confident. “There's… uh, it's a mess up here.”

“Help me up,” she insisted.

I did, reluctantly. She stared at the gruesome mess and said nothing for a moment. Her eyes were worried. She paled a little. Her voice was shaky when she spoke again.

“We should check the wheelhouse and the berths below. There might be something left… Someone, I mean.”

“You're the boss,” I muttered.

Never trust a monocled man.

Also: hooray! more entries!

Thanks! Looking forward to the next installment of DSD. I'm also curious where Sinitrena is going with her story following that nice twist at the end of the prologue.

[“The Door At The Bottom Of The Ocean” (Part 5)The Rotten Tooth]

Clean off, indeed! Now onward and upward to the next chapter!

“The Door At The Bottom Of The Ocean” (Part 5)
The Rotten Tooth

I adjusted the scarf around my face. The wool-lined leather jacket was zipped all the way up. I could barely feel the controls through my thick gloves. In the seat behind me, shivering inside the cramped cabin, Lillian was wrapped up in the blanket I usually kept in the emergency box. She looked like a mummy, but I couldn't blame her. Nobody comes to the tropics with winter clothing in their luggage.

Outside the cabin, it was a few degrees below freezing. Simple electric heaters kept the controls and gauges from freezing up, but that's about all they were good for.

We were soaring at 9,500 feet, close to the plane's maximum altitude. The throttle was nearly wide-open too. Normally, low and slow was the way to go with this old plane, but we were close to our destination. I needed to see as much of the world as possible. Even on a clear day like this, a little slice of nothing like PÃ,,“ Niho was easy to miss. And if we missed it, the next stop was the uninhabited Marotiri, if the fuel held out, which it probably wouldn't. And if we missed that one, there wouldn't be anywhere else to get out stretch our legs until Carney Island, down in the Antartic, 3,500 miles away. A long way to go for floatplane that could make maybe 500 miles on its best day.

“We're not lost, are we?” Dr. Price asked from the seat behind me. She had asked a variation of that question at least twice an hour since we'd put Tupua'i behind us this morning.

We left Toru Marama just before dawn, refueled at the little science station on the atoll of Maupihaa, and again at Maiao, then legged it to another gas station at Tupua'i, then spent the night at Raivave. A few hours before noon this morning, we'd hit Rapa Iti, a little speck that was the last place to fill up in the Pacific. I'd topped the tanks all the way up to the gas caps. Now it was midday and we were two hundred miles southeast of that little island, well beyond the border of French Polynesia. These waters belonged to no one. I doubted the small radio onboard would be of any use if we needed help. I didn't like this at all. It's a good thing for Lillian that she had such great legs. I don't think any amount of money could have convinced me to make this trip. Toru Marama was a thousand miles away now.

“Nope,” I said, with as much confidence as I could muster. “We're right on course. Should be there soon.”

“All right,” she said nervously. “Good.”

I discreetly checked the map, the compass, the altimeter, and the airspeed indicator. We were still on course. I studied the fuel gauge and did the math. We weren't going into the drink anytime soon. But on the trip back, it was going to be close. The winds had better be kind to us. A strong headwind on the return trip could force a water landing just shy of Raivave. We might have to spend the night on uninhabited Marotiri, or one of the Motu Araoo atolls until a rescue ship could be sent. Truth be told, I wasn't averse to the idea of a night spent alone with the lovely doctor.

I picked up the binoculars from where they hung by the strap around my neck, and began to scan the ocean again. We had maybe another forty minutes of loiter time left before I would have to turn around and head back.

We'd seen a military corvette on the horizon early this morning, probably English, and probably out of Pitcairn, a small warship on a lonely patrol. That was hours ago. We hadn't seen another soul since.

I rubbed my tired eyes. Corrigan was back in Toru Marama. There was no backup pilot to spell me for a while. A long day of flying yesterday, and another six hours in the air today. I was getting tired and I couldn't afford to get sloppy. This far from human civilization, even a small mistake could doom us. A few degrees off course, this way or that, and we'd fly right by the landmark we were looking for. Errors compounded quickly when the only thread linking you to the rest of the world was an invisible one that existed only in your mind, a slender lifeline made up of complicated calculations that permitted no mistakes.

I took a deep, calming breath and brought the twin lenses of the binoculars to my eyes again.

There it was, ahead and to my left, far below. A black, glittering, crescent moon shape, with a dark, inky smudge staining the water all around it, the shadow of the submerged volcano.

“Found it,” I said, as though I'd been here a thousand times before. The truth was I'd never been this far out on the edge of the world in my life. Lillian sat forward, anxious. I passed the binoculars back to her and pointed in the general direction that she should look. “PÃ,,“ Niho. It means ‘Rotten Tooth.' The natives steer clear of it. Bad luck or something.”

“Oh!” she exclaimed happily. “I see it!”

She kept the binoculars trained on it while I reduced the throttle, slowing down to about 50 mph, and began to descend in a lazy, slow circle, taking us around and around the small curl of dry land, dark and foreboding, no more than three-quarters of a mile long. It grew larger outside the cabin window with each slow pass.

With the binoculars, she must have seen the wreckage of the ship before I did, though she said nothing.

Every instinct I had told me to pull up, kick the big rudder hard to port, bring the nose around, and fly as fast as I could back to the safety of the French islands we'd left behind the day before.

Instead I cut the throttle and shuddered when I felt the plane vibrate and rattle as the pontoons made contact with the sea. We were landing in the cloudy, stained waters over the submerged crater. There was no going back now.