Free The Grimscribe's Puppets by Joseph S. Pulver Sr., Simon Strantzas, Michael Cisco, Gemma Files, Richard Gavin, Darrell Schweitzer, Allyson Bird, Livia Llewellyn, Joseph S. Pulver Page A

cried out, but the sound disappeared into the room’s jumble of distorted surfaces. He could barely hear his own voice. Colin switched on a huge steel-bodied lamp with a lens of blue glass. Max saw his own shadow crouching on the wall, twisted into a corrupt fugitive shape. With a craftsman’s delicate touch, Colin adjusted the wire cage to tighten the shadow’s pose. Then he opened a small case, took out a syringe filled with some black fluid, and injected it into Max’s left arm. He felt the sting above the pain of his trapped muscles, adding insult to injury.
    Some time passed. He couldn’t see what Colin was doing. The lamp changed color from blue to white, and then to red, but his shadow remained the same. He wondered if he could move even if the cuffs were taken off. His breath seemed to curdle, tasting sour, almost freezing on his lips, though the air wasn’t cold. A terrible silence echoed in the room.
    Then Colin came back, holding something that Max couldn’t quite see. Was it a piece of broken glass? Ignoring his prisoner, the salesman bent over the trapped shadow and cut it to ribbons. Each slice, the silhouette of a twisted body, curled away and lay twitching on the floorboards. Colin hung them on a rail, one after another. Max could hear them screaming.
    Finally, he felt Colin’s small hands releasing him from the wire cradle. He slipped to the floor, but his posture didn’t change. The slices of his shadow flinched, tortured by contact with each other. Gently, as if handling a broken pot, Colin carried him through the last trapdoor into the unlit basement. The walls were streaked with mold. On the stone floor, Max could just make out a dozen or more figures like himself, lying in fetal positions. Their skin was dead white. Only their eyes moved. Then Colin went back up the steps and closed the trapdoor, and in the dark he left behind there was no sound of breath.

No Signal
    By Darrell Schweitzer
    When the time came at last, Edmund Marshall, poet, eminent author of books on natural history, professor at a prestigious university, loving husband and father, knew that, however reluctantly, he must leave his satisfactory life forever. It was a seasonal thing, an instinct in the blood, like what birds feel when, after flying north for so long, inexorably, they turn south.
    Therefore he put down his fountain pen, gathered the pages and notes of his latest work in progress into a folder, then scribbled a note on the folder to his chief graduate assistant, I guess you’ll have to finish this , and placed folder and pen in the middle of his office desk. Handwriting manuscripts for someone else to keyboard was a privilege still allowed to tenured senior professors. Perhaps he would be the last ever to exercise it.
    He paused for a moment, trying to organize his thoughts as neatly as that file, to focus on what he should do next. He glanced at the photo of his smiling wife and exquisite, sixteen-year-old daughter, and thought that he should call his wife, not to explain, because no explanation was possible, but just to hear her voice one last time, to make small talk.
    He felt real pain now, and something bordering on panic. His heart was racing. He was beginning to sweat.
    He realized he couldn’t quite bring to mind his daughter’s name.
    He snatched up the phone on the desk and dialed. The line was dead. Then, as he got his coat, he took his cell phone out of the pocket and tried that. No signal. Ridiculous, of course. Here, in the middle of the city, in the middle of the campus, there had always been signal, but now there was none.
    All he could do was put the cell phone back into his coat pocket.
    Outside, he noticed at once that something was gone from the world. A lot of his work, his field work, took him outside, and although his teaching position kept him firmly shackled to an urban office and classroom much of the time, he loved the outdoors and had a sharp eye for living things; but now it seemed as