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 B

if the world itself were an image badly printed on a magazine cover, with one of the color filters missing. As he walked across the campus, he saw no birds, no squirrels. The spring flowers seemed to lack vitality, as if they were made of paper. If anyone greeted him as he walked, as students often did, he did not hear them. The sounds of the people around him faded into a dull static.
    He continued on his way, like a salmon leaving the ocean forever, to swim upriver one last time to spawn and meet its fate. Only he didn’t think this had anything to do with spawning.
    He left the campus and made for the subway, as he would when commuting home, though he wasn’t going home, not now. The token he dropped into the slot was, he noted with only minimal interest, featureless.
    It seemed that there were no other people on the platform. Maybe there were, but they vanished in the periphery of his vision every time he turned his head. Any background noise, much less any human voices, faded into a murmur like the sound of waves that you hear when you’re falling asleep on the beach.
    He wished he could have fallen asleep, then awakened from a bad dream back into his real life, but that was not to be.
    The train came for him alone. He stood in the middle of the empty car, surrounded by graffiti and faded, ragged posters for old movies and old products he vaguely remembered from childhood. If there were more stops, he was not sure. If people got on and off around him, if they talked and lived their lives, they were on another wavelength and he could not quite perceive them.
    He tried to weep. He searched around inside himself for that emotion and could not find it.
    The train roared and rocked in the black tunnel, but after a while even that faded into a susurrus of soft background noise.
    He could not tell when the train stopped. He had no memory of actually getting off, and was only aware that he was walking up a flight of stairs, past a broken escalator, out of total darkness into the gray, half-light of an utterly empty, cavernous station in which there was no sound at all , not even the echoes of his own footsteps.
    He passed a newsstand covered with ragged, yellowing newspapers and magazines with curling covers.
    Outside, it did not seem that hours had passed, that he had somehow made the transition from a spring morning into an unnatural twilight; more a matter that light, too, and color, had been leeched away. The cityscape before him had an oddly two-dimensional look to it, like some vast construct of cardboard cutouts on an amateurish movie set, feebly backlit.
    The only thing real to him was the cold. It was very cold, and the air had a dusty, acrid taste. His eyes watered. His throat was raw. He put his hand over his mouth and tried to breathe through his fingers, as if that would somehow help.
    Then there were people around him, rushing in the opposite direction from the one in which he was going. He pressed through the stream of them. They buffeted against him, like puffs of wind. Close up, he could see them clearly enough, but in the distance they seemed to flicker and fade, like shadows on an ill-lit wall. They were all, he realized, in flight from something. He felt their muted fear, their exhaustion and despair. One woman, very young, but dirty, haggard, gaunt, with a limp, motionless child over one shoulder clung to his hand briefly and said, “You will help us, sir, won’t you? You will stop him from getting out? You will do it?”
    He made no answer, but kept on, one foot ahead of the other. Ahead, the darkness roiled, like smoke.
    Then he was alone again. The darkness closed behind him, featureless, with only the cutout buildings looming before him. He found a door. It didn’t have a doorknob, but a crude circle painted where the doorknob should be; yet it opened at his touch. Inside, he passed through many featureless, empty rooms, rendered very slightly less than utterly dark by curtainless, rectangular