The Weighing of the Heart

Copyright © Richard Wright 2015

Cover art and design by Vincent Chong

All Rights Reserved

Smashwords edition

The Weighing Of The Heart

By Richard Wright

For it is in the arcana of dreams that existences merge and renew themselves, change and yet keep the same.

- Bram Stoker, The Jewel Of The Seven Stars

Nothing about Dubai is right. It sprawls on the edge of a huge desert, full of ridiculous skyscrapers, crazy malls, and ugly strips of artificial beach. There's almost nothing there that didn't get built in the last century. A few hints of more ancient culture have been allowed to survive, but only because they bring in some tourist bucks. The city represents our idiot species screaming with a kind of inchoate joy that yes, even there we can do what we want and screw the consequences.

It's vain. Short-sighted. We're storing up trouble that at some point has to spill over. Somebody's got to pay the piper.

Let's be real. I'm going to pay the piper. I'm starting to feel like maybe I'm humanity's fall guy for this kind of thing. A professional sacrificial lamb. Persecution complex? Hell yes. Did you skip over my byline? Go back. Check it out. I'll wait.

Yeah. Dexter Lomax. Guy who writes for The International Inquisitor and thinks he's been to another world.

Laugh it up, but I stand by what I said. I put my name to a lot of bullshit down the years, it's a job requirement for a staffer at The Inquisitor, but not that time. I saw things nobody should have to see. I went to a place where time and physics aren't even nodding acquaintances. I watched a lot of people die. I once thought I wrote the story for them, but I was kidding myself. Death happens all over the universe. Sometimes it's brutal and unpleasant. We see it, and we get over it.

I didn't write the story for the dead. I wrote for the ones I left behind, condemned to service impossible creatures for longer than any of us will be alive. Like I said, time works different there.

There's nothing I could have done to save them. That's what I tell myself late at night as the scotch empties itself into my glass. Not that I tried too hard to test the truth of that. I ran. Screw everybody else. I ran for my damn life.

There was this one guy, Jeremy, who died getting me out. Before that he asked my to write their story and see that it got read. I almost went back on my promise to do that. There are people on this world with money, and power, and an interest in that place driven by insanity and obsession. I thought that if I blew the whole thing open they'd come for me. I'm a coward by nature. If I hadn't gotten a good drunk on then I never would have sent the piece to my editor. I only found out I'd done it when I checked my sent items the next morning.

Yeah, I'm that kind of drinker now. The one who wakes up and checks his own emails and social media accounts before he even brushes his teeth, just to find out what new hell he's created for himself.

It's been a tough year. I'll get a handle it.

The Inquisitor publishes nutty stories all the time. That's my day job, dishing out crazyness and inviting readers to lap it up. Conspiracy theories, sightings, the secret perversions of the rich and famous. Anything we can get away with without ending up in court. The paper serialised the piece over five issues. I thought only our usual readers would ever see it. Between you and me they're not the sharpest tools in the box. I don't know what I hoped to achieve by telling them to watch the ground beneath their feet for craters, but it kept my promise to Jeremy.

Sales went through the roof. People who normally cross the street to avoid stepping over a cast off copy of our rag were snatching it off the rack. When it was reprinted on the website a week later it went viral and traffic crashed our servers.

Nobody even pretended to believe it. I was nominated for, and won, a Bram Stoker award. They give that out every year for horror fiction. I didn't go to their awards bash, so they posted their little haunted house statue thing to the paper's editorial address. I brought it home to use as an ash tray.

Sure, I started smoking again too. Tough year.

By using The Inquisitor to get the story out I shot its credibility in the back of the head. Nobody reads it because it exposed a hidden world beneath our own. They read it because it was dumb fun. By publishing I made sure those I left behind were dismissed. I made them characters in a fantasy. Exactly no shadowy agents from powerful cartels tracked me down to silence me forever. I'm surprised they didn't send me a six figure check. Thanks to me they don't exist.

When I moved out of New York and up to Boston it was nothing to do with the fear of being silenced. My address and landline got out to the loony brigade. I figured I'd met the worst of the whack jobs after so long in my job. When your byline goes next to the stuff The Inquisitor specialises in, you meet some pretty disturbed people. One guy locked me in his bathroom for four hours before the police turned up, desperate to make me believe his story of abduction and anal probings. I was going to write the damn thing up anyway (it was a slow week), but he wasn't going to let me out of that apartment until I'd examined and photographed the article of anatomy in question. His pants were round his ankles before I'd taken my coat off, and he was between me and the door.

Okay, so I locked myself in the bathroom. Self-preservation rules.

That kind of thing used to happen every few months. Now it's a pretty standard day. I used to be the guy who told people's crazy stories for them. Now I am the crazy story.

When they got my New York apartment number - and kept getting it no matter how often I changed it - things got too much. Some were punks, but others were true believers. They convinced themselves that every pothole was one of my craters, or that they'd escaped from that faraway world too. I could have dismissed them, but not Kirsteen. That became the problem.

Kirsteen is another survivor of last year's horror story. Her lover Jeremy was the guy who died getting us home. She's stayed with me ever since. I kind of owe her, or him, or something. There's a lot of survivor guilt washing around. She was on that world for years before escaping the first time. The return trip shattered her. Bad enough to have that place in your past, but worse knowing they can force you to go back no matter how hard you promise it won't happen. When we met there was a core of steel in Kirsteen MacDonald. I'd like to see that again someday.

Every time we got a crater call Kirsteen backslid into numb trauma. If there were more escapees coming through those portals then the creatures weren't finished with our world. They could get her again. Didn't matter that those callers were loons. Kirsteen believed them.

When I moved us to Boston we had a couple of weeks of peace, enough for her to start coming out of herself, but then they found us. I changed the number. They found it again. That became the pattern.

I was out when we got the call that put us on a plane to the United Arab Emirates. When I got home with Chinese takeout in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other, Kirsteen was waiting in the hallway, pacing grooves in the hardwood floor.

When I opened the door and saw the look in her eyes my heart sank so fast I heard it splash into my guts. The light on the answering machine was blinking behind her. I rubbed the back of my neck and tried to hide my despair. Another one?

Kirsteen raised her only eyebrow and nodded.

Right. I should have said. Kirsteen only has half a face left. Long story, and I told it last time, so you'll have to take the short version. Anybody who escaped from Planet X got picked up by a group of fanatics here who peeled them alive to make video tapes out of their living skin. Don't ask me how that worked, but when the tapes were played back you got a clip show of the victim's experiences in that other place. Half of her face was taken, right down the middle, leaving scar tissue and too pink flesh. She doesn't go out much. A slim, tall woman with a tapered fringe hanging over one side of her face draws attention. That gets worse when the fringe falls back and flashes something from an old Universal flick at you. I don't know how she deals. What's left, the untouched side of her, is beautiful.

Most of the time she's self-deprecating about it, in an antiquated British kind of way. You wouldn't believe me if I told you how antiquated. That's one for another day. I forgive her the occasional drunken spat of self-pity, when I usually end up holding her until she stops crying. The rest of the time she buries her feelings down deep.

I despise those moments when it gets to her and I'm all she has to cling to. I'm not built for them. She deserves better. Also? I don't see the scars anymore. It frustrates the hell out of me.

Okay. I hated my own irritation. Where this time?

Dubai. She murmured without meeting my eyes, which told me how lousy a job I was doing of locking my feelings down.

Do what?

Dubai. The United Arab Emirates. I don't believe you've invaded it yet. Kirsteen is English, and takes incredible pleasure from the geographical naivety of the average American. If we haven't invaded a place or been attacked by it, most of us barely know it exists. Her theory is that most yanks don't have a passport for just that reason. The rest of the world is obviously a war zone. CNN and Fox say so. Why would anybody want to go see that?

As running jokes go it's lame, but there's just something sweet about the way she does it.

There's nothing in Dubai. Dubai's...it's a crank call.

Please Dex. Listen to the tape.

I groaned like an ailing diva, threw my coat over a chair, and ducked into the kitchen. Kirsteen had a