The House of Nameless Read online

  She’s cutting a path for the boat, he realised, and even as the remote control finally failed and Lune/Diana was firing dozens of arrows per second, Yahweh’s fence shattered. Captain King James touched the tip of his tricorne with a plastic hand, and a moment later the enormity of the boat pulled alongside the shattered house.

  They were level with the tear in the hull, the evidence of Raoul’s escape that should be down near the ground. Raoul guessed what the boat was planning, and with no other choice he pitched Yahweh and Nameless through the hole. They fell into the guts of The Cheerful Misogynist, along with the growing seed that was the One-Way-World.

  #

  ‘Well, it’s a fetish boat, and the One-Way-World just happens to be Yahweh’s fetish,’ Raoul said. ‘It makes sense to trap him there.’

  They were following the secret paths to Raoul’s house via far-travel, Imogen clutched to his broad woolly chest as his legs ate up the miles.

  ‘He’ll figure it out,’ Imogen said.

  ‘Yahweh thinks he won, and who are we to tell him any different. Let him run his little play-world, I know I won’t bother him.’

  Imogen stared at him again, at the stub where his left horn was. It would take perhaps a hundred years to grow back, and he’d been halved in more ways than he cared to admit.

  ‘A fair deal,’ Raoul said. ‘The ship hid you for fifty years, so they get one horn.’

  They stood at his front door now, and as Raoul reached for the key Imogen snatched it out of his hand, with a speed that was suspiciously reminiscent of Lune. She tucked the key into a fanny-pack that she had suddenly decided was cool.

  ‘I want you to help Nameless,’ she said, gamely blocking the minotaur from his house. ‘You’ve punished him enough. It’s wrong to leave him stuck in that boat with Yahweh, the pair of them dreaming over a seed of a world. Or a universe, or whatever.’

  ‘It’s what they both want,’ Raoul sighed. ‘Neither of them want to be here, surely we owe them this small kindness.’ Imogen was defiant, but even she could see reason and fished out the chunky brass key, the one that could open the Great Library at Alexandria as well as a Starbucks in Melbourne.

  He unlocked the door and jerked it open, but instead of his filthy apartment he could see a great frothing sea, and perched on a murderous wave was The Cheerful Misogynist. He could make out Lune’s dummy on the prow, holding up a yellow curve that was his horn.

  Raoul slammed the door shut.

  ‘I wanted to move anyway,’ he said.

  ###

  About the author:

  Jason Fischer lives near Adelaide, South Australia, with his wife and son. By day, he works with archives for a government department, while his evenings are given over to the craftings of his imagination.

  He tries to unleash the weird every time he gets behind the keyboard, and his fiction has been described by reviewers as “strikingly original” and “weirdly imaginative”, while noted for containing “greasier genre elements”.

  Jason attended the Clarion South writers workshop in 2007, and has been shortlisted in the Ditmar Awards and the Australian Shadows Awards. He won the 2009 AHWA Short Story and the 2010 AHWA Flash Fiction Competitions, and is a recent Winner of the Writers of the Future contest. Jason has stories in Dreaming Again, Apex, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, and Aurealis Magazine.

  Discover other titles by Jason Fischer at https://jasonfischer.com.au

  “After The World: Gravesend” available from Black House Comics.

  Connect with Me Online:

  Twitter: https://twitter.com/jasonifischerio

  Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/2847548.Jason_Fischer

  My blog: https://jasonfischer.com.au