Epistolary fiction; Science fiction; Short stories
My kid, he reads. He says it's no joke. He wants to call the cops or
maybe some doctor. But I say no. He reads your magazine so he says
write to you, send you the letters. You know what to do. Now you have
them. Maybe you print. Whatever you do, Mr. Editor, remember my place,
the Plaza Ritz Arms, is straight establishment. I don't drink. I never
touch junk, not even aspirin.
Yours very truly,
Ivan Smernda
* * * * *
Bombay, India
June 8
Mr. Joe Binkle
Plaza Ritz Arms
New York City
Dear Joe:
Greetings, greetings, greetings. Hold firm in your wretched projection,
for tomorrow you will not be alone in the not-world. In two days I,
Glmpauszn, will be born.
Today I hang in our newly developed not-pod just within the mirror
gateway, torn with the agony that we calculated must go with such
tremendous wavelength fluctuations. I have attuned myself to a fetus
within the body of a not-woman in the not-world. Already I am static
and for hours have looked into this weird extension of the Universe
with fear and trepidation.
As soon as my stasis was achieved, I tried to contact you, but got
no response. What could have diminished your powers of articulate
wave interaction to make you incapable of receiving my messages and
returning them? My wave went out to yours and found it, barely pulsing
and surrounded with an impregnable chimera.
Quickly, from the not-world vibrations about you, I learned the
not-knowledge of your location. So I must communicate with you by what
the not-world calls "mail" till we meet. For this purpose I must
utilize the feeble vibrations of various not-people through whose
inadequate articulation I will attempt to make my moves known to you.
Each time I will pick a city other than the one I am in at the time.
I, Glmpauszn, come equipped with powers evolved from your fragmentary
reports before you ceased to vibrate to us and with a vast treasury
of facts from indirect sources. Soon our tortured people will be free
of the fearsome not-folk and I will be their liberator. You failed in
your task, but I will try to get you off with light punishment when we
return again.
The hand that writes this letter is that of a boy in the not-city of
Bombay in the not-country of India. He does not know he writes it.
Tomorrow it will be someone else. You must never know of my exact
location, for the not-people might have access to the information.
I must leave off now because the not-child is about to be born. When it
is alone in the room, it will be spirited away and I will spring from
the pod on the gateway into its crib and will be its exact vibrational
likeness.
I have tremendous powers. But the not-people must never know I am among
them. This is the only way I could arrive in the room where the gateway
lies without arousing suspicion. I will grow up as the not-child in
order that I might destroy the not-people completely.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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