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

windows, until he came to a stairway and began to climb, passing a door of the disabled elevator on each landing. He never paused, but continued his ascent because he could do nothing else, go in no other direction, as helpless as the salmon working its way upstream.
    That woman had asked him for help, begged him to do what had to be done. He couldn’t think what that might be, but he resolved to try. He had already resolved to try. That thought he had already formed, before any of this began. That much he could still cling to. He wished he’d been able to find the words to reassure her. Too late for that.
    At the very last he came to a room which, quite shockingly, was lavishly furnished, like a throne room, actually cluttered with faded, dusty hangings and furniture and with vast, crystal chandeliers hanging unlighted from the ceiling, and what looked for all the world like gold-covered mummy-cases lining the walls, only the faces on them were not of stately, Egyptian kings at all, but hideous parodies, diseased, deformed, and lascivious.
    And before him, in the center of the room was a great mirror, set in an elaborate fixture of black ivory, as if held up by two gigantic hands so finely and intricately carven that they could well have been alive.
    He stood before that mirror, and he saw, reflected in it, himself, but not himself; a figure that had all the same features and even wore the same coat, but which somehow possessed that wrongness you can see in photographs of Hitler or Charles Manson, an evil which is not expressed in fangs or horns, but in something far more subtle, instantly recognizable but impossible to describe.
    The figure was laughing at him.
    “You must have figured it out,” it said. “You must already know that he who overcame me once, who bound me into this mirror for the good of all , has been dead for some time, and the spell which holds me here has worn off, after a year, a century, a thousand years. Who knows? It does not matter. My reflection lived where I did not, lived a lie, dreamed a dream that might have fathered whole generations of nothingnesses , each suffering from the delusion it is real and solid and human, and that its offspring were real and solid and human. That might have been you. Or it might have been your great-great grandfather. But that’s over with now. Pfft! All done. Sorry! Nothing you can do about it.”
    “Someone asked me to try,” he managed to say.
    With almost theatrically convenient coincidence, there was a large hammer on a table by the mirror. He snatched it up. He struck at the figure before him, which still laughed as the hammer seemed to pass through something even less resisting that the surface of a still, clear pool of water. There was no splash, no ripple, as he realized that he was already on the inside and that the reflection of a hammer striking the inside of a mirror isn’t going to break anything. The other was already walking away from him, into featureless darkness, fading from view like the dot in the middle of the screen when an old-fashioned TV set is turned off.
    At the very end, he rediscovered his power to weep, to rage, to pound his fists uselessly against the smooth glass. He even remembered his wife’s name, and his daughter’s, and for an instant, before he forgot it all forever, every last moment of their lives together flashed through his mind.
    He even thought to get his cell phone out of his pocket once more, and try to call them, to say goodbye, and to warn them.
    But there was no signal.

The Xenambulist: A Fable in Four Acts
    By Robin Spriggs
    I. The Missing Step
    Unable to sleep yet again, he took his leave of the dark and dusty one-room apartment that his life’s actions, or rather inactions, had conspired to make his most recent excuse for a home. He descended the three flights of rickety stairs, counting every step, just as he had counted them every night since arriving two weeks ago in this latest of a long line of